Resident Evil 7: Biohazard 2: Resident Evil 8: Superhazard
by Vainglory 2KW8O
Summary: This is speculation about what could happen after the ending to Resident Evil 7. Spoilers ensue so don't read this story if you haven't beaten RE7 yet.
1. Chapter 1

RESIDENT EVIL 7: BIOHAZARD 2: RESIDENT EVIL 8: SUPERHAZARD

by Vainglory 2KW8Ω

Ethan Winters stood above the beast he had slain. He felt as though he were Thor and he had just slain Fenris, a fearsome demon that took on the guise of a wolf only this demon took on the guise of a little girl and revealed its true form as a mass of flea-like microscopic molds. He had seen he beloved ex-wife, Stacy (a/n: I forgot her name but I'm not going on the wiki to look it up) and another girl he had met named Zoe Baker, whom he would have liked to marry one day. It was ironic that Zoe, a Baker like the cannibalistic freaks who had relentlessly hunted him to kill him in sadistic glee, was instrumental in his survival and quite gorgeous while everybody else in the family was butt-ugly and looked like a mannequin sculpted out of congealed tomato soup. But Zoe was taken away from him when she transformed into a hideous monster and he had to kill her. Sadness gnawed at his heart like a half-starved infant desperately trying to suckle on her dead mother's meat.

The infant ceased its suckling when he heard something. What the hell was that sound? Was it another creature out for his blood? The noise got louder and easier to pinpoint. He looked back to see that it was a helicopter's blades that were making it. He had forgotten what those sounded like. He watched as the bird touched down, its door were thrown open, and a grizzled, well-built man in paramilitary attire and sporting 5 O'Clock shadow, perhaps a mercenary, stepped out to greet him.

The mercenary spoke, "Mr. Winters, I'm Redfield."

"Uh… Hi there, I, Uh, I'm Ethan." He thought he felt like a nerd trying to ask a hot girl to go out to prom with him. Did this guy really just say he was Redfield, **Chris** Redfield? The man who single-handedly took down Umbrella and the terrorist executives and unnatural beasts in its employ? Surely, he must have been starstruck, just like the time he met Wayne Coyne. But this wasn't exactly like when he met the frontman for the Flaming Lips. There was an off-putting surreality to this situation that he never encountered before. Something was wrong, it wasn't blatantly obvious like the first time he was attacked by Jack Baker or crossed paths with an inhuman mold creature because this was clearly a man who didn't seem to hold any ill intent against him. But still, Christ Redfield himself was right here, immediately after having killed Evelyne, the mold queen. it was almost too good to be true.

"Hey, kiddo, why don't you get on my plane?" Chris said, "We need to get you out of here."

"Oh, right!" Ethan jogged into the helicopter.

Chris slammed the door and they both strapped themselves into their seats.

"Whew," said Ethan, "my dogs are killing me."

Chris laughed, "Yeah, you and me both. I just flew in from Miami and I can feel your pain"

Ethan didn't get the joke. His thoughts were racing too fast to pay heed to this clever meta reference to classic opening jokes in stand-up comedy that was trying to cross the NASCAR track of his mind.

"Hey," Chris said, "when we get you home: how about I buy you a drink? I know a good bar."

"Thanks, man," Ethan replied, "but I'm a bit shaken up. What I really need is some shut-eye. Hopefully, I don't get night terrors and panic attacks from all of those innocent people that I saw die and that giant gungan creature that I killed moments before you arrived."

"You can relax now, Ethan. You're safe."

A great weight was lifted off of Ethan's chest. He forgot what relaxation felt like and a wave of peace fell over him. He was tempted to let himself fall onto the floor and sleep until the helicopter dropped him off at home but he wanted to sleep in his bed where it was soft, clean, and didn't have any biological freaks of nature trying to kill him so he stayed awake and looked for something to keep him occupied.

Ethan Winters looked out the helicopter window. His smartphone was missing, probably eaten by an alligator back at the bayou, so he wasn't able to play Pokemon Blue on an emulator (a/n: Blue is the best version and if you like Red better: you are an evil asshole). He thought he would get a good view of the vast, beautiful plains of Texas but, instead, he saw something that filled him with grueling terror. "Um… Why does this helicopter have the Umbrella logo on it? Is there something I should know?" he asked.

"HAHAAH! You fool! You should not have trusted me. I have become an agent for the new Umbrella Corporation!" said Chris Redfield.

"I refuse to believe that. The Chris Redfield I read about was a paragon of virtue!"

"Heheheh, the new Umbrella Corporation offered me a substantial sum of money to work for them"

"You really would betray your principals for cold, hard cash; huh, Mr. Redfield?"

"Yep. As Cyndi Lauper once said: 'Money Changes Everything.' MWAHAHA!"

Ethan couldn't believe it. Here was Claire Redfield, the man who killed the world's most notorious criminal bioterrorist, and he was telling him the inconceivable.

Chris smirked and continued talking, "you'd best get comfortable. We've still got a long way to go before we meet with my employer. Ha ha ha."

"Stop laughing at me! Can't you see that I'm distraught?!"

"Sorry, I got a case of the giggles. Tee hee."

Ethan was too shaken to think about escape. Twelve times, the helicopter stopped to refuel. Once, during a stop in Santa Fe, where Chris Redfield and the pilot did the refueling themselves because nobody else was there: a cop stopped by to talk to them and they held an extended conversation with each other for over thirty minutes. He was in such a daze that the thought of calling out to this officer or sneaking away never crossed his mind. The twelfth time was in Malibu, in full view of the Pacific ocean and the shoobies gaggling about on the beaches.

The helicopter finished refueling, took off, and passed over what could well have been the last sliver of the continental United States Ethan would ever see again. Endless blue could only be seen. To escape now would mean being at the mercy of dolphins who would abduct him and take him to their caves to have their way with him. He wasn't sure whether to be horrified or relieved that nobody would ever know how he died and presumed him to be merely missing and last seen in Louisiana; at least they wouldn't know that he died from a combination of drowning and blunt force trauma from being sodomized by the most devious perverts in the fish kingdom.

"From here, it's only fifteen minutes until you meet my employer. He'll be glad to see you. Heh heh heh." said Chris.

Ethan crossed his arms and clutched the t-shirt fabric around his shoulders like an orphaned baby monkey without its mother to protect it. The anticipation scraped against his nerves and sent a tingling feeling through his penis. He hoped that it wasn't because he jizzed in his pants out of fear: he wanted the last time that he did that to have been inside of Zoe; not his pants.

An island appeared on the horizon. The sight of this place sent chills throughout Ethan's body and he started to grow faint. It was an imposing sandstone pinecone of a mesa surrounded by treacherous jaws of stalagmites jutting from the ocean. Nestled upon this mesa was a lush jungle where he imagined velociraptors prowled the dense vegetation in search of their prey. And parting the waves of this jungle: stood a monolithic and arrogant declaration of love for evil in the shape of the Umbrella logo carved out of stone.

Chris must have gotten a call on his headset, "Yes, prepare for landing. I'll radio ahead and tell them to make preparations for our guest. Mwahaha."

The helicopter made its tedious descent and touched down on the pad. Chris flew open the doors and pulled Ethan out. The chopper's blades hadn't slowed down enough yet and were still producing noise enough noise to make Ethan cringe. That whirring guillotine reminded him of the ungodly howls some of those monsters made back at the Baker ranch.

Ethan was jolted to lurch forward by a hard strike in the back from Chris, "Get moving, you sack of pus! My employer is anxious to meet you! Hahaha!" They approached the entrance to the fortress. It was tall enough to make Ethan dizzy just by looking at the gargantuan doors that towered over him. He felt exhausted as though he had just climbed a beanstalk to the clouds and was now about to be invited into the giant's castle where his bones would be ground to mix the monster's bread.

With a clunk and an agonizingly slow creak: the doors took an eternity to swing out and swallow him in.

Chris prodded Ethan to walk forward. They walked along a red carpet floating on a sea of black and white checkerboard tiles. The taciturn Greek gods and 17th-century aristocrats lining the walls glared at them with contempt. The journey was made into a mountain climb as, with every thirty paces, they would take a step up onto a new tier of the floor. This continued for a while until they came across a sheer cavern of a ballroom. The room was a complicated shape, it was adorned with eight different stained-glass windows depicting horrendous monsters separated from each other by foreboding tunnels of oaken baroque décor. The baby grand piano off to one of the sides was dwarfed by these windows and could have fit neatly into one slice of the Umbrella logo ingrained into the center of the floor.

Each of these slices, however, were pointing directly at a man standing in the dead, black center of the logo with his back turned to Ethan.

"Ah, it's good to see that you've finally arrived. I made tea and toasted brioches for you because I assumed you were deathly hungry after your strange ordeal at the Baker family ranch." the Man said as he pointed up.

Edgar Winters followed his finger and saw that the sunroof was also of stained glass and depicted a blonde man with sunglasses and a malignant poker face. the spitting image of that sunroof was now facing him with a smirk and a vintage pair of Gargoyles.

"My name is Albert Wesker. Welcome to my humble adobe."


	2. Chapter 2

It took every ounce of strength for Ethan to suppress the urge to scream incoherently. However, he had not enough strength left over to ask his most pressing questions in an angry and accusatory tone. They came out half-blubbering and on the verge of panic, "ALBERT WESKER?! YOU'RE ALIVE?! HOW?!"

Wesker responded coolly and in a matter-of-fact cadence, "You may have heard that I had died waist-deep in molten lava and struck in the face with warheads from two rocket launchers held by my greatest adversary and his new partner. Well, I'm okay now. As a matter of fact, I took that faux pas on the chin and offered Chris a position as my right-hand man."

Chris chimed in, "Heh heh heh, yeah, and I only needed to kill that tag-along slut, Sheva Alomar to get this job."

Ethan couldn't process what was going on fast enough before he heard haughty, aristocratic laughter from another hallway. "OHOHOHO! Oh, Ethan you are such a sap! It's no wonder I divorced you and extorted you for alimony to buy five new pairs of cute shoes and twenty bags of premium gourmet dog food for my corgi!"

The voice belonged to a svelte woman in a flattering business suit with a long classy hairstyle that she copied off of Kate Middleton. She really didn't look all that good with it because she was a blond while Kate was a brunette. She also wore Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and purple lipstick that made her look like a bitch with a very punchable face.

Ethan was frightened of this woman, she could tell and she was willing to use this to her advantage, "Oh, Honey, don't you recognize your dearly beloved waifu? It's me, Mildred!" (a/n: somebody told me that Ethan's wife's name was Mia but I don't believe him).

Ethan recoiled, gasping with fright. She wasn't scary in the same way the mold monsters were but she was made terrifying because of how enticing she was. Her womanly aesthetics gave him an erection and he hoped she wouldn't notice because then she would point it out to Chris and Wesker and they would tear him apart with their most insidious weapon: laughter.

Ethan gathered up his courage and spoke in a weak voice, "Mildred?! I saw you die! And you had Asiatic features in your face and hair!"

"Ah, haha, oh, Ethan, wasn't it obvious that you were duped into thinking that a **clone** Mildred was your beautiful ex-wife, aka moi? She was planted on the Dulvey Haunted House property to lure you in so we could kill you and extract your valuable DNA to make more BOW's. Type Double O Negative plasma like yours can be given to anybody but it can also be given to us to make the ultimate lifeforms like that girl, Etienne, whom you killed back in Lousiana!"

Ethan had forgotten that Mildred was a blond and the fact that the other Mildred looked like she had anglo-chinese ancestry did not tip him off when she sent her facecam transmission onto his phone.

"You're a clone?" said Ethan, "Then that means that Wesker and Chris over there are clones too! There's no way any of this makes sense unless everybody except me is a clone!"

"Oh, you're so solipsistic, Ethan!" Wesker's voice took an upswing in faux regality, "For one thing, she just said she wasn't the clone: that was the half-breed mungrel you thought was your wife who was the clone. Chris and I are not clones either. The Wesker who was killed in the cauldron of Mt. Killermanjaro was a clone of me! And Chris here knows a winner when he sees one, that's why he joined us."

This was hard for Ethan to wrap his head around. Every revelation related to him flew completely in the face of logic. Wesker was still alive, Chris was working for him, and Mildred looked completely different from his preconceived memories. What was going on?! HOW!? WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE WHY?!

"Well, I do say, you done got a look on your face that says you're more confused than a bull surrounded by red curtains in a textile mill." the voice was all too familiar.

Ethan turned his head in the direction of the voice. A figure obscured by shadows briskly strutted from the corridor between the windows stained with the ghastly visage of woodcut monsters.

"And, might I say, you also look like you done had a real bad day like you spent all of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday looking for an invisible roadrunner in a 30-square mile long pickle patch. Maybe you ought to be sleeping it off before Friday comes along, little lady. Hyuk hyuk hyuk!" And small wonder why it sounded so familiar.

Ethan would have liked to say _you son of a bitch, I should have killed you back at the ranch!_ But his voice was cracking and on the verge of crying and all he could muster were a few pathetic whimpers. He hadn't seen Lucas die back at the Haunted House in Dulvey. He had hoped he died somewhere in Louisiana, that miserable, putrid sinkhole of a state, but couldn't be sure of anything. The world was a crazy place but to see some spoiled man-child hick from the middle of some disgusting hillbilly wasteland occupying the same room as the most sophisticated terrorist mastermind the world has ever known made him gain new appreciation for how certifiably insane it could really be.

Lucas Baker stepped into the light and it became readily apparent that he had changed his clothes. He had ditched his hooded sweatshirt and taken a perverted embrace of his Deep South heritage that conveyed a status of power and prestige by dressing like an oil baron. It came complete with the garish trappings of western fashion: cowboy hat, bolo tie, and steel-toed work boots. He joined in the circle of fiends surrounding Ethan and took his turn in humiliating him.

"You know that I had a bit a' 'engine-new-ity' in inventin' things, as you might well know, but what you don't know is that I also know a thing 'er two about molecular biology. I dun' made the molded you was fightin' back at that there ranch. Indirectly, anyways, I genetically engineered Enoby so she could make 'em for me. Weren't they just perdy lil' thangs?"

Albert Wesker chimed in, "Yes, and with a few modifications of my own: the molded shall be the hottest item on the BOW market! HA HA HA!"

Mildred traipsed over to Albert and pressed her body against his. She stroked her finger up his body while she glared at Ethan, her bedroom eyes could be seen behind her sunglasses. She smiled. Ethan had never seen her smile like that before. It was full of venom but promised delights beyond his wildest dreams. This made his erection more clearly visible through his pants and his facial expression twisted into something goofy.

Mildred must have noticed the look on Ethan's face and glanced at the bulge in his pants. A shining gleam flashed across Mildred's eyes, her lips widened into a sadistic, catty smirk and she pointed her finger at Ethan, "OH-HO-HO-HOHO! Look, everyone he has a boner! How delightfully embarrassing!"

The expression on Ethan's face abruptly changed into a piteous one. Chris joined in as though this was a high school hazing ritual, "Holy shit, you're right! AHAHAHAAH, what a dweeb!"

Ethan fell to his knees and collapsed into the fetal position. He had given up any pretense of having dignity and sobbed uncontrollably. He wished he could just faint and let it be over with. It was funny, actually. This is precisely what he did to a boy named Ramon Salazar, a weird foreign exchange student with progeria, back in the first grade. He noticed that Ramon was pitching a tent in his 18th century trousers and thoughtlessly drew everyone's attention to it. They then burst into raucous laughter, even the teacher, when he kicked the weirdo dressed up as Napoleon in the junk. He supposed karma was a bitch but at least it was merciful enough not to let him get kicked below the belt.

Over the course of ten minutes, they laughed at Ethan as he cried to himself. A hysterical riot, at first, but the spiteful humor of the situation gradually faded away as boredom took over. When silence took hold, Wesker stepped forward and pulled a needle out from his pocket.

What was that? Was that heroin?

"I know what you're thinking. I'm telepathic, we are all telepathic. And no, it is not heroin. This is just a horse tranquilizer that will put you to sleep so we can move you to your cell. Fear not, Ethan, this won't hurt a bit." Wesker lied. It did hurt. It hurt like hell. Goddamn, he hated needles.

But a groggy, hateful sleep soon took hold of him. On more than one occasion, he had slammed two entire cans of Natty Daddy and this horrendous feeling taking hold of him felt very similar and suggested to him that he would have a restless sleep like he did when he had been wasted on that cheap pisswater.

"Take him to the cell block in sector-" Ethan could only hear him from three feet beneath the surface of a swimming pool of lithium. A hazy blackness overtook him and he dreamed of bizarre creatures dressed in ugly plaid shirts staggering towards him as he lay on the floor, paralyzed, emasculated, and helpless.


	3. Chapter 3

Ethan had a lucid awakening. His nightmares took a surreal turn from pure day residue to a clumsy, panicked flight through wonderland, culminating in desperate clawing at the walls and ceiling of a velvet-lined oaken prison encased in earth and utter darkness, and finally ended with the ceiling giving way to sweltering stale air. His senses came back to him and he could see a little bit of light again. His breathing steadied but, as it did, an invisible jackhammer in his head sent shock-waves through his skull. It hurt to think but he couldn't help but have questions racing through his head. Where was he? What was he doing last night? Was he hung over again? Oh shit, did he have to go to work today? What time was it?

As his thoughts gradually stopped racing: he realized that he wasn't feeling like a morbidly obese, nymphomaniacal crackwhore who woke up in a dumpster behind the Burger King several hours after having a massive heart attack during a Whopper-eating contest for the fourth morning in a row because he had been downing half a bottle of bourbon alone at home on a Tuesday night again but because the most notorious bioterrorist in the world had injected him with some kind of sedative. Dilaudin? A killer strain of heroin? Horse tranquilizer… Yeah, that's it, that's what he said it was.

He waited for the effects of the tranquilizer to wear off. He had no idea how long he had to wait before he could get up and move again and the light he saw never changed in its luminosity so it could not have been the sun, otherwise, he'd have a good idea of how long he was lying on his prison cot.

His strength did return to him and he tried to get up and stretch himself out but he was overcome with a need to vomit and blew chunks at the wall. And that's how he found out he had a cell mate.

A shadowy figure rose to its feet and groaned. The sounds of rattling chains followed suit. Ethan was taken aback by this development and clumsily staggered back, tripping and sitting down hard.

Somebody flipped the lights on and Ethan could then see the creature in more detail. Even though his puke stained the creature's shirt to a bright green color, he could tell by its blue slacks that it was probably a security guard but he could tell by its ashen-face, agape jaw, and inhuman expression of dull torment that held no interest in eating doughnuts but it was thinking of having something less disgusting than a beef sandwich slathered in mystery cheese, wrapped in foil, and sitting under the glow of a lightbulb on the rack at Arby's. That is to say, _brains_.

"Hahaha, I see you've already met your cell mate. A-ha, I think he wants to show you a good time; I would not be so discourteous as to not present your penis to his mouth if I were you, yeeeees!"

Wesker was standing beside his cell. He had not his sunglasses on and his eyes were glowing a faint blue with just enough luminosity for Ethan to notice. So that must have been the faint light he was seeing in his cell. It turned out to be a wrong guess that it was fluorescent lights reflecting off the wall in a stairwell and it was especially foolish to hope that it was sunlight. No, these were the eyes of a sharp-dressed devil who hid them behind movie star shades. Ethan withdrew his limbs into himself as a turtle would withdraw into it shell and he wrapped his arms around himself

What did he want from him? Ethan didn't really even care what was going on at this point, he just wanted to go home!

"Ah, but we can't let you go home, Ethan. You already know too much about our operations and we can't risk you leaking information out to the public." Wesker said.

Information? He didn't remember finding any top secret documents or whatever and all he did was see a bunch of monsters that disintegrated without a trace when he killed them. If he told anybody about what he saw: they'd put him in a crazy house. What good would killing him even serve?

"Oh, don't worry, we don't plan on killing you. We're just going to make you into one of our new test subjects. You show an impressive tenacity for surviving although you're more of a rabbit than a wolf but that's not to discount that such an animal has had a viable evolutionary strategy up to this point."

Rabbit? Wolf? What did he mean by that?

"I'm saying you're a gutless poltroon who runs away and cowers like a little bitch instead of putting up a fight as opposed to a braver man who stands his ground and fights! Truly, with such a metaphor going over your head: I'd say you're more of a lemming, a dumb rodent that's every bit as craven as a rabbit but leaps off of cliffs without a moment's hesitation because he saw others of his kind do it."

"I do declare that he be more like a possum than an animal that's a modicum respectful," Lucas Baker's noisome, bogus New Orleanian affectations floated down the cell block like a cloud of hydrogen sulfide, "T'ain't even brave enough to follow his true love off a cliff and'd rather be playin' dead like a couple a' queer boys caught necking in a chinaman's dress!"

"Bullshit, man!" It was Chris' turn to chime in, "he's more like a mouse! He's a scared little pussy that'd get cannibalized by bigger versions of itself."

"You're both wrong," the harlot with a voice like mercury, Lydia (a/n: the same guy tried to prove that her name was actually Mia by linking to her wikia page but I doubt it's her real name because anybody can edit those) plucked his nerves like the strings on a steel guitar. "He's a guinea pig. An oversized marsupial good for nothing but to be our scientific plaything."

They could all see him then. Their icy gazes and sadistic smirks filled Ethan with terror and their awful, mocking voices plucked at his nerves like a badly tuned guitar. He could curl no further into his fetal position and started to cry.

"AHA, look at 'im." Lucas jeered, "He's crying like a goddamn ten-year-old girl!"

Lucas howled with laughter and the other men joined in with Chris' being raucous and crude while Wesker's was more dignified but venomous. Lydia, however, did not laugh. Instead she grinned widely.

"Oh-ho, I know what will cheer him up." she said with a smirk.

She had a red jumpsuit on with a zipper on the front complimented with a jacket that flaunted her curvaceous figure. She strutted towards Ethan, swaying her hips like a supermodel. Chris could tell she was planning something, "Oh shit! This is going to be good! I'm gonna stream this on StickAM!" and he pulled out his smartphone and moved for a better angle.

Lydia bent over in front of Ethan, licking her lips and bringing her thumb and forefinger to her zipper. He could smell her breath and, he thought, it smelled of peppermint. God, why did it smell like peppermints?

"It's a new diet I've been on," Lydia said as she unzipped her jumpsuit, revealing her cleavage, "I eat nothing but gum; it's done wonders for my figure. Oh, and by the way, and it's not peppermint, it's wintergreen you stupid, spineless wretch of a man!"

She started playing with her boobs, squeezing and massaging them. Ethan felt exhilarated watching her do this: his heart raced and the blood flowed to his penis. but at the same time, he was scared stiff (pun intended) and ice water flowed through his nerves and down his spine. Then, she removed one of her hands from her breasts and reached for Ethan's lap. Instinctively, Ethan wound his fist as tight as he could against the wall and struck Lydia right in the tit. His fist dug into her chest and she bounced back. She screamed in surprise and staggered back towards the other end of the cell where the zombie sat. She landed on the zombie and Ethan expected it to chomp down on her… But it didn't even budge.

"OH! GODDAMN YOU ETHAN!" Lydia yelled indignantly as she sprang up and brought her hand to her breast to check if was okay, "IF THERE'S A SILICONE LEAK IN HERE: I'M GOING TO SUE YOU!" She ran off in a fluster while Lucas and Chris guffawed at the scene. "Dude! I knew there was a good reason for me to stream this! I already got 60 million hits and 50 thousand likes from my subscribers!" He high-fived Lucas and they excused themselves for beer at the commissary.

But why? Why didn't the zombie bite down on her like it was supposed to?

"Ah-hahaha! Ethan, I'm glad you noticed some new features in our latest product. We've developed a new line of zombie that is stronger, more agile, and intelligent than all previous incarnations. In fact, for our intents and purposes: it's better than a human being because we don't need to pay any wages! It's standard procedure at this facility to convert all qualified security personnel into zombies!"

Wesker did not need telepathy to notice that bovine expression of confusion on Ethan's face.

"Allow me to explain: we discovered a nanoscopic virus that is endemic only within the microscopic innards of the Plaga parasite. Not all Las Plagas are capable of infecting and controlling their hosts. To do that, they need this virus to fulfill their evolutionary purpose. We, to use a colloquial expression, super-sized it to make it capable of bestowing its gifts on humans. And it's only transmissible through injection and becomes inert in water so we do not have to worry about airborne nor waterborne infections here. Safety first, I always say."

Wesker had Ethan's rapt attention.

"We have christened this virus, the P-virus! Not only does the letter P rhyme with T, G, and C but it is also indicative of its origin: the Las Plagas parasite! It has done wonders for your cellmate: he's follows orders without question, has a limited capacity for thought, has the dexterity needed to operate firearms, and he can even speak. Allow me to demonstrate..." Wesker then cocked his head to the zombie, "Peon, state the purpose of your existence. In a dog's voice."

The zombie, or peon, spoke in a gravelly and remarkably good Scooby-Doo impression, "Rye, am Reon! Rye robay all rommands riven to me rye Raster Resker! Rye rall restroy rall ris renemies to racilirate ris rans ror a raster race!"

The fuck was he saying?

"I'm afraid our guest didn't catch all that, could you please repeat that in a normal voice?"

The Peon then spoke in a voice that sounded normal but had a pronounced vocal fry. It was still remarkably good, it barely came off as inhuman at all, "I am Peon. I obey all commands given to me by Master Wesker! I shall destroy all his enemies to facilitate his plans for a master race!"

Wesker smiled, he looked delighted, "Ha! Truly captivating how he can repeat that without frustration. Do you see what I mean when my specimens are better than humans in a lot of ways?" His smile shifted into a slight frown. He was all business now, "Peon, arise! There is work to be done, come with me. But from now on, keep using the dog's voice; I find it amusing." the Peon rose to its feet, "Res, raster!" and walked out of the cell, taking his place by Wesker's side. "My house is at your disposal, Mr. Winters. I have business to attend to." Wesker closed the door to his cell and walked away, the peon marched in perfect time with Wesker's steps, making their footfalls sound as though it came from one giant.

Ethan thought that he was forever trapped in this cell. With no obvious means of escape and no motivation to find any, Ethan sobbed softly to himself. He was taught by his parents early on in his boyhood that crying would never get him anywhere in his life and he had done a good job of being stoic up until he had been abducted by Chris but having to endure such atrocious treatment and unrelenting terror had been too much for him to bear.

He lost track of the time. Was there any real reason to do so anymore? He lost himself in a paracosm. If he could not leave his cell, he could escape into his imagination and wander the streets of his own private city, a masterpiece of baroque architecture where the streets were paved with black and white chessboard tiles, and snow fell from the blanket of dark clouds that protected his city from the uncaring void of outer space and the threatening glare of the Man in the Moon, bringing delight and romance to his Burton-esque expressionist metropolis. He looked towards the fountain at the garden in the heart of his city and saw the girl of his dreams. She looked quite a bit like Lydia but her face was kind and her hair was styled in a no-frills ponytail. He would have loved to have gone up to her and asked for a dance but she turned to him first and said...


	4. Chapter 4

"Hey." a voice spoke softly to him. It took a second for Ethan to bring himself back to reality and figure out who just said that…

ZELDA (a/n: omg stop flaming you trolls! I have played the game but it's been awhile so I don't remember what his wife's name was but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Mia)!

Ethan scampered as far away from the voice's owner as possible and whimpered inarticulately as though he were a diminutive, miserable goblin who, having wallowed in darkness all of his life, cowered in abject terror before a proud, tall, and beautiful high elf radiating an aura of light from within herself. OH SWEET JESUS, IT WAS FUCKING ZELDA! PLEASE GOD MAKE HER GO AWAY!

The woman moaned and clutched her head, "mmm, not so loud!" she said, "Your thinking is too loud." A further few seconds of observation made Ethan realize that this wasn't his harpy of an ex-wife come to sadistically torment him again. She was blonde, wore a jumpsuit, and had a shapely, athletic, hourglass figure like Zelda but a few key differences clued him in on her actual identity...

For one, her hairstyle was done up in a ponytail which was made for practicality rather than in emulation of a Hollywood actress. For another, her jumpsuit was purple while Zelda's was red. Her lips were painted purple but they were painted with lip gloss rather than lipstick; Spending his Sunday evenings alone with his cross-dressing paraphilia, thus being able to tell the difference between lip gloss and lipstick, turned out to have come in handy for Ethan in this instance.

"Sorry," Ethan said, now self-conscious about having racing, panicked thoughts, "So I guess you're telepathic too?"

"Yes," the woman said as she diffidently touched both index fingers together, "I'm infected with a special strain of P-virus called the X-virus. It allows us to telepathically read peoples' minds but it also allows us to block telepathy from other people with the X-virus so we still have to talk normally to each other."

"Are you one of them?"

"No, they tricked me into coming here and tried to make me join them but I kept refusing so Wesker made me into one of his guinea pigs."

"Hold on, how'd you get tricked?"

"It was Chris. Chris was my old partner, y'know. We've been through a lot together and I would have followed him anywhere he needed me to. But, he came up to my house one day and asked me to go along with him; he said it was urgent. Then, we drove two hours to a remote location outside Reno." the woman swallowed hard and her inflection took on a more distressed tone as she reluctantly recollected her memories, "And then, I saw that there was this helicopter with the umbrella logo painted on the side and I asked Chris what the deal with that was but then he laughed like a lunatic and dragged me inside of it so I ended up here."

Ethan stayed quiet. The woman cleared her throat and then changed the subject,

"Anyway, I've been watching you for a while. You see, I can't escape from this awful place on my own and I need help. I've been spying on Wesker and his goons and they've been talking a lot about you and how you managed to ruin their investment into their mold project. So, I think you could help me." the woman then pulled out a chain, "I've been trying to get your attention, you know," The woman rattled it and continued speaking, "when that peon startled you, I shook it around to see if you'd notice. And then the lights came on and I heard Wesker speak so I stood perfectly still and concealed myself with my camouflage mutation."

Ethan was puzzled about this 'camouflage mutation' the woman had just mentioned.

"If I stand perfectly still: I can blend in with my surroundings and become invisible," The woman demonstrated this by disappearing and Ethan was momentarily convinced that she was just a hallucination or a mere figment of his imagination all along. But then she materialized a moment later. "And I think it even blocks infrared sensors too."

This spectacular feat could not have been logically possible. Her clothes disappeared along with her body and that pleather jumpsuit had a zipper on it. Metal wasn't alive so it couldn't turn invisible like a human being.

"Oh no, you're mistaken Ethan," wait a second, how did she-, "I'm really sorry, but I read your mind to find out your name. I know it was very rude to do that but please forgive me. Anyway, this jumpsuit isn't made of pleather: it's actually a special weave of P-virus infected crocodile leather and the zipper is made from its teeth and bone. This is all natural, organic material that becomes part of my skin by virtue of touching it; that's why it can turn invisible with me."

Ethan was still confused by this but he was willing to accept this woman's explanation so long as she could get him out of this cell.

"Don't worry, I can get you out. I picked this key off of Wesker when nobody was looking," she held up a skeleton key. It seemed odd to Ethan that these cells would be locked by something so primitive. Perhaps, Wesker expected power outages and wanted old-fashioned keys that could work when more modern, electronic keys would prove useless. But then why would he bother to move prisoners when he could take just as much delight in having his prisoners die of dehydration.

"There's no profit to be had in having his test subjects die like that," she said as she inserted the key into the padlock. She then twisted it clockwise and pushed the door open. Its hinges made a nerve-scraping creak that yearned for oil. "Come on, we've got to go!" she said, "put your hands behind your back and walk in front of me. If we run into a peon or somebody like Lucas, I can pretend to be Zelda."

"Wait," Ethan said, "I don't even know your name. Who are you?"

"Oh, I'm so sorry! My name's Jill, Jill Valentine. Pleased to meet you."

Oh shit, he knew about her. She was there at the Spencer Estate incident and she survived the destruction of Raccoon City back in '98… But why was she blonde? Wasn't she supposed to be a brunette?

"I'll explain later," again, she read his mind, "but, right now, we got to go, hurry!"

They walked briskly through the cell block's hallways. It was a cold, sterile, unfriendly place with gray slate bricks tightly bonded together with neat seams of concrete. Half of the cells were empty but some of them had prisoners inside who were suffering mental breakdowns and gibbered to themselves or sobbed bitterly in despair. Others had prisoners who sat motionless in their cells; they might have been catatonic but they could just as well be peons. Occasionally, there would be indecipherable strings of alphanumeric identification markers on the walls that were supposed to tell the staff their locations within this maze of anonymous holding cells but, in practice, they only served to confuse them further. After about a minute of tandem power walking in a straight line, Jill directed Ethan to make one turn to the right and they entered the elevator at the end of that hallway.

"We're going to my room where me and my baby are being held." Jill said as she pressed the button marked 'forty-five' (there were over 100 buttons for individual floors marked as English words rather than just a dozen with numerals printed on), "if we see anybody: just be quiet and act casual. Oh, and clear your mind too. Think about your ex-wife sexually abusing you so that Wesker and his goons don't suspect anything."

Ethan didn't know Jill had a baby. He would ask her about it soon enough but, before then, he had to clear his mind. He forced himself to think about Zelda holding a broken broomstick in her hand, taunting him before she was to sodomize him with it. It came to him a lot easier than expected.

What didn't come easy, however, was the suppression of a strong urge to panic as the elevator stopped on the 2nd sub-basement. Then, the doors opened up laboriously like the curtains of a magic theater's stage, and Chris Redfield hopped on.

Oh God, was Chris going to join in on the fun too? When Ethan read 1984 out of curiosity, he came across the term 'doublethink,' the act of holding two contradictory beliefs to be true or false (or one true and the other false) at the same time, a mental game of three-card monte that Ethan realized he was already well-familiar with and quite proficient at. He never would have thought he would need it to save his own life. Thankfully, Chris wouldn't be able to tell what was on Ethan's mind.

"Hey, Zelda, hit Fifteen!" Chris said, slightly slurring his words.

"Ugh, are you drunk and high at the same time again?" Jill said indignantly in her impression of Zelda. Ethan noticed that Jill was not quite heightening Zelda's Received Pronunciation enough for Chris not to catch on.

"Like, yeah! I always lace my beers with LSD for breakfast!"

Breakfast… That meant that the time could be anywhere from 5 to 10 o'clock… Or maybe Chris was one of those post-adolescent frat-boys-at-heart who woke up at 2 in the afternoon and would complain about the local Perkins being closed.

Jill grunted her disgust again, "Ugh, do you have to do that every single morning? You're supposed to behave yourself as a professional."

"Okay, first off, I am a professional so fuck off, you cunt. And second of all, it's like what Michael Jackson always said: 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough,' and I can never get enough because of my X-virus infection! my body flushes out the inebriating effects of drugs, and alcohol, and household cleaning products in a matter of minutes. But on the plus side, no hangovers!" Chris laughed like a fool.

"Yes, yes, you've told me all of that before and it's all very nice but, God, you're irritating to put up with when you're getting your jollies off imbibing in street drugs like some filthy African orphan."

"Hey, bitch, don't judge me about my habit when you're taking a prisoner to your bedroom, probably to do some hardcore Eyes Wide Shut shit like in Hellraiser and you don't even let anybody watch."

"What I do in my bed chambers is not of anyone's concern! It's not a public behavior like what you're doing now."

"Pfft, whatever," the elevator then reached the 15th floor, "Zel ya later."

"Ugk, I hate how you always say 'Zel ya later' in order to mock me for my name!"

"Well, duh, who names their kid Zelda in a post-Great Depression world? Goodbye and go fu-!"

The doors closed on Chris before he could finish his delightful salutation and the elevator proceeded to its destination.

Jill exhaled in profound relief. It was almost as though she had just surfaced for air after being held down nearly to the point of having no choice but to breathe in the drink, "We are very lucky that he was high," she said in her normal voice. "He's a very talented telepath."

Ethan just wondered what was on the 15th floor.

"Oh, that's just where they manufacture guns and the 5.7x28mm rounds that go with them. Chris is probably going there to mess around with his custom P90's and Five-seveNs; he holds them two at a time like Chow Yun Fat and they're gold-plated with tiger stripes too."

Ethan could only be half-surprised when he learned another detail about how unpleasant Chris had become. That is to say that he would be baffled at first because he had heard for so long that Chris was an upstanding hero but then he would feel foolish for not realizing that the unexpected was the only thing that could be reliably expected from that two-faced, backstabbing douchebag.

"Yeah, I know. He wasn't always like this, though. He used to be a lot more practical about the firearms he carried: like a Beretta 92 and a Benelli Super 90… Simple, plain, no-frills service weapons, y'know? But, since he started working for Wesker, he likes to customize his stuff to look as garish as possible and have them re-chambered for obscure cartridges."

"So how come they can make P90's and stuff?" Ethan's mouth worked faster than his mind this time. Listening to Jill talk had relaxed him enough for him to feel comfortable with speaking up. And, even though Jill was still restraining him by holding his hands behind his back, Ethan felt reassured by her touch and, in turn, she knew that he did not want her to let him go.

"Wesker has guys who used to work at FN Herstal on that floor. They were tricked into working for him as slave labor and he tells each of them that, if they try to escape, he would..." Jill trailed off.

"Kill them?"

"Worse. He said that he would sneak into their houses, hide under their childrens' beds or in their closets, turn into a monster, and eat them." Jill's voice started to creak and grow a little hoarse, "He told them that, if he had the time to do it, he would stare at them for three nights with glowing yellow eyes in order to strike fear into them before devouring them. But, since he had prior obligations and schedules to keep, they should have been grateful that he would be disposing of them so mercifully and expediently." She tried to hold back a sob and a sniffle but she couldn't quite help it. Ethan guessed that she was imagining how terrified the children would be if Wesker was not so pressed for time that he was unable to terrorize children so deliberately and sadistically.

"You're right." Jill said, reading his thoughts again. Ethan did not consider her to be a trespasser violating the privacy of his mind. She was a warmly welcomed guest.

The elevator stopped at floor 45 and the doors opened to a peon in a guard's uniform with a slate grey face, lifeless white eyes like cue balls, and necrotic hands that were bulging with black veins and gnarled around a P90. "Rardon re, Rissruss Relda!" it said as it boarded the car while Jill and Chris made their departure, marching toward her room.

Was that the same zombie that shared a cell with Ethan?

"I doubt it," Jill said, "Wesker makes every peon talk like that. He may be a horrible monster but he can be pretty goofy as well. I think his X-virus infection has messed up his brain a little."

Ethan gave a half chuckle. He felt it wasn't exactly meant to be funny but it was quaint enough to warrant one.

The corridors here stood in stark contrast to the barren slate ones on the prison floor. This one had wallpaper, varnished oaken doors, and paintings of potted plants on the wall. Jill explained that they were a rare species of herb that grew in very few places other than in the Arklay Mountains. Since the herbs in the Arklay region were irradiated by the nuclear bombing of Raccoon City, they were harder to come by. Wesker was synthesizing them in his hydroponic facilities on Floor 10.

But Ethan did not have those paintings as the most pressing thing on his mind. This place looked a lot like the maternity ward of a hospital. He wondered if this was a medical wing. Jill further explained that this was the living quarters for Wesker's scientists and other non-peon personnel. Security was usually sparse on this floor with one peon making three scheduled inspections of the dormitories per day and, one or two times on random dates of a month, there would be surprise inspections in the earliest hours of the morning. They would rouse everyone from their sleep and then they would be ordered to file off for work, a deliberate brainwashing technique that some cults use that Wesker also employed to reinforce loyalty to Umbrella.

While Jill was talking about herbs and inspections, however, the pair had been making numerous right turns and neither of them kept track of how many they were making. Jill let go of Chris' arms and grabbed his hand, "Sorry, I got myself distracted," Jill said. "Come on, it's this way." They made a left turn and then one more right then they came across a door marked '4542.' Jill turned its latch and she gently pulled it open.

"Here it is." Jill said, "This is where I'm being held. Come on in, I'd like you to meet my baby."


	5. Chapter 5

Ethan's eyes were assaulted by a foreign color he had forgotten. He wondered how long it had been since he had last seen the color pink. Having been thoroughly cloyed by the colors of putrid filth and scientific abomination, he was so astounded to see a clean room wallpapered with solid pink that he was overcome with an intense feeling of elation akin to a religious experience.

"Ta-dah!" Jill exclaimed, using the enthusiastic body language of a magician's assistant.

The walls were bordered with a halo of hearts that cast a saccharine charm of cuteness over the nursery which was furnished with select choices from the IKEA catalog. A sitting area with two armchairs and a coffee table between them took prominence in the center of the room. Along the walls, from Ethan's immediate left to his right: there was a play area with a toy box and a rug that was meticulously detailed with a bird's eye view of a city printed on it which, Jill told him, was of her own design and based on her recollections of Raccoon City's layout. Along the adjacent wall, there was a modest cot for Jill to sleep in with a bare nightstand beside it. Next to that, a changing table with talcum, baby powder and an electric bottle heater placed on it with a hatch labeled 'FURNACE' looming above it, presumably for the disposal of used diapers. Next to the table was a china hutch stocked with a variety of spirits from vodkas and rums to scotches and tequilas and paraphernalia to complement them such as martini shakers and glasses. On the wall adjacent to that was the baby's crib and Ethan could make out a swaddled bundle resting within it.

"How do you like my room?" Jill asked cheerfully, "Carlos was nice enough to convince Wesker and Chris to give me a nursery for my baby."

Ethan's amazement turned to confusion. Carlos? Who the hell was he? (a/n: I completely forgot about Carlos. Thanks for reminding me, reviewers.)

"Carlos Oliveira is the Assistant Chief of Security at the Isla del Muerte facility," explained Jill. This was the first time Ethan learned the name of his prison and he was disappointed that the place was given such a creatively bankrupt name. "Yeah, Lucas named it. But, anyway, Carlos and I go back to the Raccoon City disaster. When I was trying to escape from the city, Umbrella sent in these mercenaries to do some damage control and he was one of them. I didn't trust him at first but he turned out to be really was a nice guy and we saved each other from Nemesis a few times."

"Nemesis?" Ethan asked.

"Oh, he was a scary one. Have you ever seen the Terminator?"

"I saw Terminator 2 but I never watched Terminator 1."

Jill tossed him a smartphone and told him to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia. Ethan took a seat on one of the armchairs and got to reading. Meanwhile, Jill picked the baby up from its crib and patted it on its back.

"Hey, what's the baby's name?" asked Ethan. "Zach," Jill replied (a/n: my name is also Zach but this is merely a coincidence. I named him after York's imaginary friend from Deadly Premonition).

Ethan went back to reading and Jill grabbed the formula from the electric bottle heater and allowed Zach to suckle on it. She gently rocked her body to keep the baby relaxed. Ethan glanced up to Jill and the warmth and joy of her smile rubbed off on him. He was used to seeing fear or malice etched on other peoples' faces and his nerves had been live wires surging with sour electricity for the past several days. To see contentment on Jill's face was to make the circuit within him inert and safe to fix.

When he was done reading, he pressed her to tell her story, "so, I guess you were relentlessly chased by a hulking robot just like Linda Hamilton too, huh?"

Jill nodded, "Well, that's the gist of it but, since this i one of Umbrella's virus monsters we're talking about, this obviously wasn't a robot. But, it wasn't at all like Umbrella's other monsters; this thing could operate a FIM-92 Stinger missile launcher so it was as smart as they needed it to be," her tone suddenly changed as she went further into a tangent, "the thing is, though, I found out, a few years later, that they made another one before him who was smarter."

"Why didn't they use him then?"

"He refused to obey them and tried to escape from Umbrella's laboratories so they had to kill him. I'd like to think that he wanted to warn us all about what Umbrella was planning; even their own monsters thought their perversion of the natural order was despicable. Myself and the other survivors of the Mansion Incident tried to warn the RPD ourselves but our Chief of Police was corrupt to the core and he had everyone convinced that we were crazy people so we were discounted as hoaxers. If that proto-Nemesis had been able to escape and stand with us to testify the truth: then Umbrella might not have left so many pieces for us to pick up."

Ethan took a moment to think about the many points in history from which simple actions had profound and far-reaching consequences that rippled into even more points in history from which more actions resulted in even more consequences. It was easy for somebody to say that he could solve all the world's problems by going back in time to kill Hitler when he was a baby but the conditions that allowed Hitler to take power in the first place were the result of World War I so it would make more sense to prevent the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and that was only the culmination of many decades' worth of friction between nations dating back to the mid-19th century which were, in turn, a continuation of political tensions from time immemorial...

"Hey," Jill said, startling Ethan from his trance, "don't think too hard on it. Trying to fix the past like that would only make more problems."

"Sorry," Ethan said. He felt like he could use a drink.

"Would you like a drink?" asked Jill.

"Heh, you read my mind."

Jill giggled, "Hold on, I'll grab some glasses from the cupboard."

Jill laid her baby in the crib and walked over to the hutch to collect some glasses. Ethan admired the delicately sculpted contours of her body and was particularly entranced by the shape of her rear. It looked soft enough to use as a pillow but had a firm enough tone to indicate that she was no slouch when it came to exercise. She carried the two glasses to the coffee table and set them down. She then went to Zach's crib. Ethan got another tantalizing glimpse at her rump that tempted him to get up, sneak up to her, and squeeze it. Jill then returned to her armchair with her baby held to her chest and began unwrapping the baby from his swaddling. Suddenly, the warm feeling of lust Ethan felt in his body was replaced by a rushing chill of ice water that ran down his spine.

Like opening a Christmas present expecting a toy train but finding a genuine shrunken head with its eye sockets stitched closed, Jill unwrapped the swaddling and revealed a half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort, stained with runners of dried formula that had been dribbled onto its shoulder and ran down to its insweep. Ethan stared wide-eyed as she poured her 'baby' into the glasses with a serene smile on her face. "Bottoms up!" Jill exclaimed as she raised a toast and chugged the bourbon. Ethan stared in bewilderment as she poured herself another glass and emptied it into her mouth. She smiled in oblivious good humor.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! That's your baby?" Ethan said. He deliberately played up his astonishment like a soap opera actor so as to emphasize how shocking this was.

"He's my little bundle of joy. One day, he's going to grow up big and strong, get married, and have beautiful children of his own but, right now, he's small enough to be held close to my heart and I'll cherish every moment of it." Jill said. Ethan wasn't sure if Jill was waxing poetic about her apparent psychotic alcoholism or if she was genuinely deluded that that bottle of SoCo was an actual baby.

"Uh.. Jill, that's a liquor bottle. You know that, right?"

The delirious happiness broke apart on her face. The sinews beneath her face turned to lead, weighing her eyes down, and her lips quivered like the mighty and opulent London Bridge faltering under the strain of a hundred Mack trucks and the relentless battering of blusterous flurries of hurricane-force gales. She started to cry. She brought the liquor bottle to her face, cradling it like a real baby, and let her composure crumble into the River Thames.

"Oh no, my baby's a hemophiliac and I've been draining him of his blood like a vampire! I really am a bad mother! I'm sorry, baby! I'm so sorry!" Jill brought the liquor bottle tighter against her chest. As the simultaneous agony and ecstasy of her tears overtook her, she gradually sunk down to the floor where she curled herself into the fetal position, crumpled like a used tissue. Several minutes passed.

"Hold on, Zach. I'll give you CPR, you're going to be okay!" Jill tearfully pleaded to the bottle. She then brought it to her lips but, rather than taking a deep breath and blowing into it, she greedily slurped at its nectar until it was completely empty. The horror of what she had just done then dawned upon her, "Zach! No! You got SIDS! I'm so sorry I let this happen to you, my little baby!" (a/n: coincidentally, my mom's name is also Jill.)

She lay on the floor, blubbering inarticulately in a pathetic stupor. Ethan had been watching this eccentric performance in utter bewilderment but his first instinct was that he felt as though he should have walked over to Jill and comforted her. He had to suppress that instinct because experience informed him that that was quite dangerous to do.

Back in high school: he had a girlfriend, Rebecca Chambers, who behaved erratically, recklessly, and was prone to intense fits of rage or crying. One night, when she had been drinking heavily, Ethan obeyed his first instinct, as he was tempted to do now with Jill, and Rebecca scratched his face and hissed obscenities at him like a mangy cat. She then ran out of her parents' house, slamming the door behind her. Moments later, she was gunning the engine of her Stingray and Ethan knew that that was his cue to leave. The next night, at one o'clock in the morning, he received a phone call from Rebecca, tearfully apologizing for her behavior, and he responded by slamming the receiver into its cradle and yanking the phone's cable out from the wall. He never talked to her again and she disappeared a few days later. He had heard that Rebecca's stepfather pulled her out of school and they moved to Colorado. He did not care to learn any further details.

For Jill, Ethan felt he could do nothing but let her bizarre frenzy run its course. Back on the elevator, Chris mentioned that the effects of drugs in X-virus infected individuals would wear off in five minutes so Ethan killed time by playing Flappy Bird.

Jill's crying fit eventually settled down to sniffling punctuated by the occasional gasp and Ethan then felt it was safe to help her back into her chair. Her bloodshot eyes and the streams of eyeliner that ran down her cheeks made her look like a hooker who hadn't slept in a million years. He gently set her in the armchair and used the bottle's swaddling to clean her eyes.

"I'm sorry you had to see me like this, Ethan." Jill's voice was raw as a blue rare steak.

Ethan tried to think of a tactful way to ask Jill about what had just transpired. What did they do her? What was that all about? What -

"Let me explain," Jill took a moment to collect her thoughts and prepare herself for a long story, "It was several years ago, back in 2006… Chris and I had a lead on Wesker's whereabouts and we pinpointed his location to Ozwell Spencer's private estate."

"I read about this in Soldier of Fortune magazine!" Ethan exclaimed. "I heard you died there."

"Don't worry, I didn't," said Jill. "I was abducted by Wesker and taken to his secret facility in the southern region of Sudan, which became the Kijuju Autonomous Zone, and is now called South Sudan. It was there where he had done experiments on me and injected with chemicals derived from the Progenitor virus into my bloodstream. They called it 'P-30' and it gave me unparalleled, superhuman strength and agility but it also made me susceptible to mind control and Wesker used that to his advantage to make me do horrible things that I'm ashamed to speak of. It also made my hair blond, in case you were wondering." Ethan was, indeed, wondering about that and he was glad to have had that explained to him, "So, anyway: Chris and his new partner, Sheva Alomar, happened to be investigating weird occurrences in the Kijuju Zone and we happened to cross paths each other. They freed me from Wesker's mind control and we all joined forces to take down Wesker once and for all. We toasted him. He was waist-deep in lava and we fired two 40mm HEAT rockets directly at him. We all assumed he was gone for good. But, just last year, Chris took me to his helicopter and told me Wesker's work with me was unfinished. To say nothing about how horrified I was to see Wesker still alive, the first thing he immediately told me when I met him was that he was disappointed that the effects of his P-30 chemical wore off in a matter of hours so he developed new methods to make me an even better super soldier than I was before. So, it was here at the Isla Del Muerte facility that they injected me with the X-virus and created a bio-chemical cocktail of P-virus infected Mold enveloped in a hybrid protein shell that combined the G, Cameron, Uroboros, and T-Veronica viruses that was injected into a Nemesis bravo-type Plaga that they then injected into me. However, Wesker forgot to put in the C-virus so he wasn't able to control my mind. He's been keeping on this floor until he can figure out a way to fix me."

"Weird," Ethan said, fascinated by Jill's story.

"Not only that," Jill said. "But, it made me infertile. I've never had children before and I've wanted at least one for a long time. Wesker took that from me."

Ethan felt for Jill. He wanted children of his own as well but Lucille (a/n: Oh great, another dude is telling me it's Mia! Look, trolls, her name is not Mia; you are all victims of mass hysteria and that explains why you all seem to think that's her name. Also, I don't need an editor: I do my own proofreading; neither error nor bagu can get past my eagle eye! And my grammar is not horrible: she still bakes me cookies when I visit her ^_^) was never able to conceive a zygote because, as he found out when he arrived on the Island, the Lucille that he thought he knew was a clone of the real one, who turned out to be a horrible, awful person.

"He had the same thing into his body, too." said Jill, "But he also directly edited his genes with nanobots that Lucas made for him so that he could remain the most powerful human being in the world. He considers himself more of a god than he's ever been before; he's retracted all the times he said he was a god and now says he meant to say he was a demigod because now he's a definitely a god."

"I see..." said Ethan.

"This cocktail has given me truly astounding enhancements to my physical and mental performance," Jill explained, "I can deadlift 5 tons without a spotter, sprint faster than a cheetah for several days and never get tired, speed read each volume of The History of My Life by Henry Darger in 8 minutes and write a comprehensive review of it in two hours and, unlike the effects of P-30, its effects are permanent so it will never wear off and I can smoke as much as I want and never have to exercise."

"I didn't know you smoked."

"Yeah, Carlos gave me some of his to keep the edge off." she said as she unzipped her jumpsuit and pulled a pack of Camels out of her cleavage, "All he has is this cheap stuff but he promises he'll smuggle me in some Virginia Slims as soon as possible." she pulled a single from out of the pack, made a guttural hissing noise as though she was about to hawk a loogie, and fire gently blew from her lips like bubbles from a tiny wand. Her cigarette was now neatly lit.

"Holy shit." Ethan shouted in surprised.

"I'm sorry," Jill said, crossing her legs as she brought the cigarette to her lips and took a drag. She used her whiskey glass as an ashtray. "I forgot to mention that I could do that, too. I'm so used to doing this by myself I kind of forgot that not everybody is capable of breathing fire." She then swallowed, "I have to be careful not to breathe out the smoke. It's bad for the baby."

Ethan briefly considered asking her if she meant to say 'the liquor bottle' rather than 'the baby.' But he quickly resolved to refrain from doing this. But Jill had already read his mind and she was now starting to whimper and sniffle.

"Jill, please, I'm sorry!" Ethan said frantically, trying to calm her down, "I couldn't help it, it just came to my mind all of a sudden. Just, please, don't cry!" he said as tears came to his eyes as well.

"Okay." Jill said as she was on the verge of a bitter cascade.

She eventually returned to the subject of Albert Wesker's godhood, "I have that much ability as a super-human and yet Wesker is exponentially better than that. He can bench press three oil tankers stacked on top of each other, run slightly slower than an SR-71, and speed-read The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest in 10 minutes and write a comprehensive review about it in two seconds."

"How does he do that?" Ethan asked.

"He just writes that it was a complete waste of his time." said Jill.

"Great, and I guess he can breathe fire too."

"He can breathe liquid oxygen."

"You mean liquid nitrogen?"

"No, oxygen condensates at an even lower temperature than nitrogen so it's much colder than that."

"Alright," Ethan said as he cupped his hand over his mouth and started nibbling on it, hoping that his bites would kill the circuit in his nerves. "So, what do we do?"

"Well," Jill said as she craned her head to the liquor cabinet, "we can always use this secret passage behind the cupboard. It leads to a cache of weapons and supplies that Carlos keeps hidden around the facility."

"Awesome," said Ethan. "Can you help me push it out of the way?"

"We don't need to. We just have to take one of the Matchbox cars from that toy chest and insert it in the lever disguised as a bottle of Cognac."

"Okay, tell me which car it is so I can put it in the Cognac."

"It's the DeLorean. It's a stainless steel sports car that has gullwing doors and louvers on the back."

"You don't have to tell me what a DeLorean looks like: I've played Hotline Miami."

"Okay," Jill said as she rose from her armchair. She went to her bed to grab a carton of cigarettes she kept under the mattress.

Ethan opened the toy chest and dug through Mighty Max playsets and Duplo blocks, setting them outside it, to find the matchbox cars buried beneath. The DeLorean was the first to catch his eye. Although there were twenty others, none of them had the polished luster of the DMC-12 and that made it an obvious key. Ethan grabbed it, returned the toys to their box, then ran to Jill.

"Here you go, Jill" Ethan said as he passed the car to her.

"Thanks," Jill said as she opened the hutch's top drawer and inserted the DeLorean inside the indentation in the bottle of Rémy Martin XO. She then proceeded to grab the bottle by its neck and cranked it like a slot machine. They stepped back and the cabinet swung open to reveal a shadowy passage. The only visible object in there was a switch with a red button and a green LED. "That switch opens and closes the passage," Jill explained with a newfound urgency in her voice. "We have enough time to take the DeLorean out of the Cognac and get rid of it so Wesker's henchmen can't figure out how to open this."

"Shouldn't we carry it with us in case we need it again?" asked Ethan.

"That key is useless to us, now." said Jill. "I doubt we'll ever need it again."

Ethan grabbed the toy car from the indentation and pocketed it. He wasn't so eager to discard it because he had a fondness for cars designed by Giorno Giovanna. He then looked into the passage and hesitated. "Gee, it's kind of dark..." He said uneasily.

"It's okay," she said, reassuring Ethan, "I can see in the dark. Take my hand and I'll guide you through."

They held each others' hands and walked past the threshold from the protective pink warmth of the nursery to the harsh, cold, and uncaring darkness of the passage. Jill Turned back to take one last look at the empty bottle of Southern Comfort on the floor. "Hold on, there's something I want to do..." Jill said as she walked to the empty liquor bottle on the floor. She grabbed the bottle and the swaddling, took them to the changing table, and wrapped them together. She carried the bundle to the crib, kissed it, and laid it down on its mattress. "Goodbye, Zach," she said as she stroked it. She then turned away, entered the passage, and pressed the switch. The hutch swung to its original position and they were bathed in darkness. Ethan reached for Jill's hand but he had trouble finding hers. Jill snatched his hand in one motion and firmly held it. The LED was the only thing to be seen in the pitch blackness and it had turned from green to red.


	6. Chapter 6

"Dearly beloved associates," Wesker proclaimed, beginning his sales pitch to a panel of the world's most vile power players and terrorist leaders who seated themselves around a mahogany table. Carved into its legs were Gargoyles with spiteful glares and envious claws that clutched at spheres in their reliefs. "We are gathered here, today, to witness the dawn of a new era! In my hands: I hold a vial of our latest weaponized pathogen: the Mold!"

"Mold?" said Samuel Regan, a former Army Colonel who recently had a second midlife crisis in his 70's and decided to undergo a process of age reversal through controlled viral infection called Pathogenic Rejuvenation and become a filibuster, a mercenary warlord who invaded countries with a private army in order to annex them as United States territory. "Mr. Wesker, I'm going to need something a little more effective than ordinary mold in order to take down the government of Nicaragua."

"This is no ordinary mold!" said Wesker. "It can infect humans and make them extremely enraged and violent, give you absolute control over their minds, and regenerate lost limbs. It can also gather together in one lump and take on any shape you desire, and it can infest houses, making them uninhabitable!"

"Sure," said Vincent Goldman, who was actually Ark Thompson. He had stolen Goldman's identity to gain access to Umbrella's B.O.W.'s so he could start his own terrorist organization but changed plans when he learned that Goldman was Derek C. Simmons' brother (the real Vincent had changed his name to Goldman in order to ingratiate himself into a powerful and wealthy family who owned several highly successful multinational holding companies and investment banking firms) and the immediate successor to leadership of The Family. Wesker, being telepathic, already knew that Goldman was really Thompson but he didn't care because the real Goldman was inconsequential to his plans anyway. "But the latest version of Plaga can already do those first three things. And, if I wanted to make my enemies call a fumigator: I would just use ordinary mold."

"Ah, but can Plagas and ordinary mold take on the shape of whatever you desire?" Wesker said with desperation starting to creep in.

"Sounds like gimmick, comrade." said Svetlana Belikova, former president of the Eastern Slav Republic. "How can I be expected to take over home country with only one case of Mold when I can buy twenty case of baseline plaga for same price and get similar result?"

"Yes!" shouted Bitores Mendez in agreement. He had survived his encounter with Leon S. Kennedy by histrionically faking the throes of death and playing possum. He regretted having to deliberately allow his false eye to fall from his socket in order to escape with his life but he got a new one that had a purple pupil in it. He thought it was very cool and had grown attached to it but Chris accidentally knocked it out of him by patting him too hard on the back so Mendez had to make due with a simple eyepatch. "Plus, your company does not have the best track record with safety. When I served under Lord Saddler: Los Illuminados was never sloppy with the merchandise. On the other hand: your facilities in the Arklay Mountains, Raccoon City, Rockfort Island, and Antarctica all had accidental viral outbreaks. Considering how regular toxic black mold has plagued my rustic community for decades before Saddler graced us with his presence: I can be assured that if one of my flock had butterfingers while handling a vial of this mold: we would face severe consequences."

"The Mold is perfectly safe! it's a mold so it's nothing like a virus and it's a better value than the plagas!" Wesker said, thankful that nobody would notice he was getting teary-eyed behind his shades.

"Look," said Jenny Kay, formerly one of the very few executives of the previous incarnation of Umbrella with Level 10 security clearance. She was a prime target of Ozwell E. Spencer who, having been in danger of extradition to the United States for countless felonies after the Raccoon City Disaster, ordered every executive to be killed to cover his tracks but she had faked her death. She now lived in an underground bunker at an undisclosed location that nobody could possibly know about because she used Tor to browse the internet. "We're just here to buy the usual Tyrants, Lickers, and Nemesis-alpha Plagas and I just came here to buy some Neptunes for my moat. So, please, stop trying to push this mold on us, will you? We're not interested!"

"Oh, come on!" Wesker shouted. "Do you know how much money I sunk into this stupid project? Just buy it already!"

"You're a mediocre eugenicist, Wesker!" heckled Clive R. O'Brien, who used to be the director of the BSAA until his position was dissolved when the organization merged with the FBC and got multinational government backing and UN support so his position was deemed superfluous and he decided that he wanted B.O.W.'s to get his revenge on the BSAA.

"You're a better scam artist than you are a good virologist!" shouted Bruce McGivern, the current director of the BSAA and a puppet of The Family. The BSAA was never really intended to stop the threat of bioterrorism but to facilitate it and covertly exacerbate it.

"You suck, Wesker! Go to hell and take your ugly sunglasses with you, ya cunt!" yelled Alyson Court, the Executive Director of TerraSave who was secretly buying B.O.W.'s from Wesker and reselling them at exorbitant prices to bioterrorists around the world and using her non-profit organization as a front for money laundering that catered to corrupt pharmaceutical companies and terrorist organizations.

"This mold thing is stupid." Said Bobby Barrows, who was a preppy jock from Denver, Colorado who liked to wear backwards baseball caps and Abercrombie and Fitch shirts that said '#YOLOSWAG'. He got rejected by a cheerleader named Jennifer Simpson and wanted to get his revenge by killing everybody at his high school with a B.O.W. of some sort. "This shit is gay! I'm out of here and taking my trust fund with me."

"You guys are idiots," ranted Wesker. "You can't possibly imagine what power you could hold in your hands if you just hand over a few measly billion euros!"

His customers refused to listen. Amidst the cries of "BOOOO!": strips of tenderloin flew at Wesker like an unkindness of angry seagulls. Wesker could only hold his forehead in his palm as though he had a migrane. To think that he had gone through the trouble of kidnapping a dream team of five-star chefs to prepare a delicious meal that had taken three hours to cook for these ingrates, only to have this precious and expensive food thrown at him as though he was a thief in a stockade. That tenderloin could have been donated to feed dozens of starving Majini in Africa!

They all got up out of their seats and headed for the door. Just then, one of Wesker's peons shambled towards him with a beverage on a tray.

"Rexcuse ree, raster Resker!" the peon asked in his raspy voice. "Right rye rugjest ravving uh rice rold root reer? Rat ralways reers ree rup!"

"Not now, Billy. Shamble back over there and don't bother me!" Wesker said, distraught over having blown his sales pitch.

"Hey!" shouted O'Brien. Every associate who was eager to walk out the door was suddenly interested in this strange servant. "Who is that?"

"Oh, him?" asked Wesker. "You wouldn't be interested, he's just one of the help we keep around here. We have all of our security staff infected with our proprietary P-Virus to make them better suited for their jobs"

"By God," exclaimed Regan. "You're Billy Coen, aren't you, son? I heard you escaped in the Arklay Mountains and I sent Special Forces on a manhunt for you! If I hadn't gone over-budget, I would have kept sending men after you until they brought you back alive and I would have shot you, myself. But it's nice to see that you've got some gainful employment these days, dickweed. That viral infection suits you."

"Rank you, Rister Regan!" said Billy, good-naturedly. His P-Virus infection rendered him socially retarded. Although he was capable of understanding commonly used idioms, he was unaware of the subtle nuances and body language that made up 90% of human communication and anything said to him that was overtly spiteful could be rendered completely inoffensive by saying something that could be literally interpreted as a compliment even if was laced with obvious sardonicism.

"This is amazing," said Court. "I didn't know you were capable of making zombies that talked!"

Wesker could telepathically tell that everyone's interest was piqued by Billy's queer nature. Splendid, perhaps if he could convince them to buy P-Virus cases at an inflated price instead of Mold he could recoup the money sunk into that project.

"Ah, but we are," said Wesker. "this is a revolutionary development we have made in T-Virus production. We've taken the best parts of our Parasitic and Viral lines and made the sum of their constituent parts even better than ever. This new zombie, or Peon, as we like to call it: is an infectee of the P-Virus. But, unlike infectees of the T-Virus: he is no feral animal but an obedient servant with all the manual dexterity and intelligence he needs." Wesker then issued this command to the peon: "BILLY! PRESENT ARMS!" Billy then did an elaborate gunspinning routine with his P90 akin to a mall ninja twirling nunchucks that lasted for over two minutes. At first, it tried the audience's patience but won them over when he tossed it into the air like a baton, did a backflip, caught it with flawless precision, and finished it off with a wink and a tongue click. The prospective customers then showered Billy with thunderous applause and cheers of "Bravissimo!"

"That's cool and all," said Mendez. "But is he capable of doing other tricks?"

"Ah, he most certainly is," said Wesker. "Billy, sing your favorite song!"

Billy prepared himself to sing by doing a lip roll and he belted out some soulful lyrics...

"REE ROOK A RALK RAT RIGHT RUT IT RUSN'T THE RAME!

REE RAD A RIGHT RON RUH ROMENADE ROUT IN THE RAIN!

SHE RED SHE RUVED REE, RUT SHE RAD RUMWHERE ROO RO!

REE RUDN'T REAM RHILE RYE RELD HER ROAS!

RYE RARE RYE REVER RET RER RO-O!

RELL REE RUT ROO RANNA RO!

RO RUM ON! RO RUM ON! RO RUM ON!

RARE AIN'T NO ROTIVE ROR RIS RIME!

RENNY RUZ UH REND OF RINE

RO RUM ON! RO RUM ON! RO RUM ON!"

The customers gave a standing ovation that would have lasted for an eternity had they that much time to give. But, one by one, they stopped applauding with Svetlana, who was so moved by Billy's performance that she had a bright smile and a tear in her eye, being the very last.

"That was delightful, Gospodin Billy!" cheered Svetlana. "I use Peon to start circus act and take over home country that way; people will love it! Ever since I was little girl, I wanted to dress up as slutty ring mistress just like multiplayer skin from Timesplitters 2 that took me years to unlock!"

"Well, son, I am impressed!" said Regan, "how soon can I get a case?"

"It can be yours immediately at the price of €30 billion!" Wesker stated with uncharacteristically amateurish eagerness.

"I'll give you €100 thousand per case and I won't go any lower," said Regan. "I suggest you cut your losses and accept this offer."

Wesker hesitated to speak, "...That sounds perfectly reasonable." he said in a tone that wavered a little from his usual authoritative voice. He had a sinking feeling that he had just knocked himself off of his own perch at the top of the totem pole.


	7. Chapter 7

Chris refreshed his P90 with a new magazine and cycled the action to insert a new round into the chamber. He pointed it at his target: a lone man standing in a field of blinding white post-modern futurism. The man wore nothing but a black Speedo and a gimp mask which did so little to protect his modesty. He was wide-eyed and slouched over, looking at Chris as a deer looks at a hunter pointing a Mosin Nagant at his chest. But, Chris was not interested in killing him as expediently as possible. He could feel the fear surging through this man and it gave him a constant, rushing thrill like the moment one has an intense orgasm after going one month without fapping and the pleas for mercy racing through this man's head were a symphony of beautiful panic.

"Alright, you fuckin' android! Make like Afrika Bambaataa and DANCE, SUCKA, DANCE!" Chris shouted as he squeezed the trigger and let loose a swarm of bullets at the man's legs. His legs moved crazily to narrowly avoid the hail of gunfire.

"JAM, SUCKA, JAM!"

Chris fired another burst and the man narrowly tap-danced his way out of a bullet wound.

"GROOVE SUCKA, GROOVE!"

Again.

"MOVE, SUCKA, MOVE"

At that moment, the man's luck ran out and he received two bullets in the shin. His body would have been riddled with the over-engineered plinking rounds had those two not been the last in Chris' magazine. He cried in agony.

"I TOLD YOU TO MOVE, SUCKA! WHY DIDN'T YOU FUCKING MOVE!"

Chris threw his P90 onto the floor in a petulant rage while peons dragged the victim off to the infirmary.

"Hey, Patrick! Beer me!" Chris shouted at the long-suffering former butler of Ozwell Spencer.

"Would you like me to lace it with LSD again, sir?" Patrick asked cordially. He was professionally-trained and had years of experience dealing with people who behaved awfully. As a result: he commanded a very high price for his services but he sometimes wondered if coal miners had an easier job than him.

"Oh, you know I do, stupid asshole!"

"Could I interest you in a Taras Boulba from Brasserie de la Senne this time?"

"Stop trying to push that faggot hipster shit on me and get me a goddamn 40!"

Patrick turned to the minifridge and walked towards it to grab another Olde English 800. Oh, that lout probably wanted to have it served in a wine glass again.

"I heard that!" Chris shouted.

Patrick had forgotten that Chris and his cohorts could hear other peoples' thoughts. It was taxing enough to monitor one's speech but to monitor his own thoughts was a truly immense undertaking. He wondered if Master Wesker was having an easier time with selling his mold than he, himself, was with catering to the whims of an upstanding gentleman like Chris Redfield. Patrick personally thought that Wesker's mold idea was moronic but, being a smooth talker, he was certain the Master would be able to charm his customers into buying his mold at any price he commanded…

… Contrary to what Patrick was thinking, however: the mold's sale turned out to be an impossible task so he was trying to sell P-virus instead.

He took painstaking, methodical measures to try to convince each and every customer to buy cases of his virus at absurdly high prices but to no avail. Every one of them demanded to pay only €100 thousand per case. He hoped that Vincent Goldman, (or, more properly, Ark Thompson) would be willing to buy his P-virus at a higher price. He poured the precious sands of time down the drain chatting with Ark. For every moment Wesker spent explaining to him that he knew what his real name was, reassuring him that he didn't mind it at all because Vincent was such an insignificant pawn to his plans and listening to Ark prattle on about his experiences on Sheena Island: he wished more and more that he was in his lab discovering new ways to make bioweapons. His mind was ejaculating uncontrollably with ideas for scientific abominations and having to play salesman with creeps like Ark Thompson was cock-blocking him.

However, he had been gently steering the conversation toward the subject of those two children that Ark had encountered on that island and had rescued from the real Goldman. If he could learn what he needed from him then he would be able to use this information to his advantage. Eventually, the opportunity presented itself...

"...So, whatever happened to those two kids you encountered? Lott and Lily Klein, I believe their names were?" asked Wesker.

"Oh, uh…" Ark hesitated. "Yeah, well, I always wanted to know what cannibalism was like so I ate them."

Wesker thought that Ark must have been bullshitting him. He must have kept in contact with the two brats after their little adventure on that island. If Wesker could just probe his mind to have him reveal their locations: he could kidnap them and make Thompson comply with whatever price he demanded then he might actually make a profit on that afterthought of a virus to make up for that miserable flop of a-

"¡Perdón, señores! ¿Ustedes saben dónde está mi madre?" a meek, tiny voice broke Wesker's concentration. He snapped his head toward a young girl, no older than seven, in pajamas with her arms protectively wrapped around a teddy bear. She must have been the illegitimate offspring of Chris and one of his Argentinian sex slaves who wandered off from his harem. They spoke some kind of degenerate jungle language that Wesker didn't recognize and refused to speak civilized languages like Latin, Hellenic Greek, or Livalect so Wesker only went to Chris' harem to collect worn out whores he didn't want anymore to use as test subjects for his gene therapies and bio-weapons. The little girl's voice wavered on the verge of tears, "¡Quiero mi mamá!" Wesker tried to make sense of this waif's weird, incoherent babbling. Just what the hell was she-

"MEAT!" Thompson shouted as he leapt at the girl like a ravenous cheetah on a sickly wildebeest. The girl screamed, trying to shield herself with her stuffed animal, but it served as much an effectual gesture as trying to protect oneself against the force of a typhoon with a paper plate. Thompson pinned her to the floor, Wesker heard a bone snap, and the girl cried in a euphoria of grueling terror. Thompson dug his teeth into her neck while making savage porno noises like Dennis Hopper's character during the part where he was breathing in Amyl Nitrate from an oxygen cylinder and dry humping Isabella Rossellini in Perfect Blue.

The girl's eyes widened, overflowing with tears of fear, and her screams became gurgling gasps as they were stifled by Thompson's teeth. Thompson then crunched his teeth further into her neck as a Rottweiler would do to a Pomeranian and, with a jerking, inhuman motion of his body, he ripped her jugular vein out from her neck and the life in her eyes slowly faded away. Thompson let out an animalistic hiss of victory, dug his face into the gaping wound he inflicted, and gorged upon it with monstrous, ravenous greed.

Wesker had never seen anything quite like this happening before his eyes and, for some odd reason, he found this altercation to be very arousing; he had a hardon like you wouldn't believe. However, he was just as much angry and disappointed. This meant that Thompson really did eat those kids and Wesker wouldn't be able to use them for leverage to make the money he needed.

Thompson, momentarily raised himself from his meal and wiped the gore from his chin. He missed a few spots.

"I'm sorry, that was rude of me. Would you like some?" he asked.

"No, thank you," said Wesker,"I prefer my meat to be cooked medium-rare."

"Well, more for me," Thompson said as he then resumed his feast. The girl's eyes remained wide-open, eternally glazed over in abject horror.

Eventually, Thompson finished off his meal by shoving the girl's entire body down his gullet in the manner of a boa constrictor. He then turned to Wesker, "Man, I hate kids. When I was on Sheena Island, the constant whining I had to put up with from those rugrats gave me PTSD! They do make for good eating, though."

"Funny," said Wesker. "When you thought you were Vincent: you tried to convince the children that you were willing to redeem yourself but then you found out your true identity was that of Ark Thompson and you became the sort of man I could respect. But why?"

"Well, I kind of liked the idea of being a bad guy. It just had this, sort of, ring to it, you know? BAD GUY! It kind of sounds cool, I mean, 'bad' has the same number of letters as 'guy' while 'good' doesn't. You know what I mean?"

"No, I don't really get what you mean and, frankly, I don't care. How much would you like to pay me for a case of P-virus?"

"How about €100 thousand just like that army colonel, or that MILF who wanted to be a ring mistress, or the high school jock, or, you know, everybody else?"

"They got a discount. I think €10 billion is a perfectly reasonable asking price; take it or leave it."

"Heh, even I can tell that you don't have the leveage to make that kind of deal. You're buying at €100k."

Wesker sighed, "You drive a hard bargain Mr. Thompson, or should I say, Goldman. Very well, how many cases would you like?"

"Eight cases will be enough. Hold on a second," Ark grabbed his checkbook and scribbled on one of its checks. He ripped it out and shoved it in Wesker's hand. "There, that should cover it."

"Thank you. Your cases will loaded onto your helicopter."

"The pleasure was all mine. See ya later."

Thompson loped away like a kid skipping down the sidewalk while wearing a propeller beanie.

Wesker looked down on his check. A measly €800 thousand and no gratuity to go along with it. Where did he go wrong? He traipsed into the elevator and hit the button for the firing range and armory. As it began its descent, Wesker continued to brood and, like a teapot cooking over an electric stove, Wesker's anger gradually intensified into a shrill whistle of suppressed screaming...


	8. Chapter 8

Chris slammed his 40 and tossed it over his shoulder. He was getting cloyed by the constant influx of LSD and alcohol and the thrill of terrorizing human targets with sprays of 5.7 bullets was losing its appeal. He just wondered what Wesker was up to...

Suddenly, The elevator doors flew open and Albert Wesker stepped out to deliver a primal roar of pent-up frustration.

"Rut's wrong, Raster Resker," one of the security guard peons asked. "Rid you rake a rilling on your Rold rale?"

Wesker instinctively punched this peon in the chest with the force to send him splattered against a wall about 200 yards away with his body shattering like a pane of tempered glass tapped lightly on its edge with a hammer and the joints in his limbs and neck popping out like bras and pearl necklaces forcefully pulled off from the back by a strange hand, flying in every direction.

"Ruh-oh!" another peon said as he turned 180 degrees and tried to run. In an instant, Wesker lunged at the peon and ripped his spine out. The peon collapsed in a pathetic heap and Wesker twirled it around like a lasso before throwing it at a live security guard. Wesker expected it to impale this poor sap but his vest prevented its penetration. "Well, I guess you could say that you've got a bone to pick with me, eh, esé?"

"Goddammit, CARLOS!" shouted Wesker.

Wesker stomped his feet and dumped a fat, bearded scientist eating a doughnut out of his chair. The scientist, frightened by Wesker's stormy temper tantrum, ran off like a pig getting sexually assaulted by a horny hillbilly. Wesker sat down hard in it and cradled his head in his hands.

Only then was Chris making a conscious reaction to the commotion and his head wandered around like a dumb cow's would after it had been bothered during its meal of dry grass by a bored preteen. His eyes eventually met Carlos'.

"Oh, hey, Carlos," Chris said, "how long have you been standing there?"

"Oh, not too long, Boss," said Carlos.

Carlos was the de facto director of security at the Isla del Muerte facility. His official title was only that of assistant chief of security, being subordinate to Chris. But, since Mr. Redfield was a feckless gadabout with a disdain for order, work, and human life in general, Carlos was the one solely responsible for keeping the facility safe.

"Hey, uh, I really wanted to talk to you about getting a raise," said Carlos.

"What do you need a raise for? You make plenty of money." Chris had had this conversation before and he was never intent on giving Carlos a dime more than he thought he deserved.

"Sure, but I just figured that, since I'm working for two and doing both our jobs quite swimmingly, I figured I deserve just as much as you make."

"Swimmingly, huh?" Chris' voice took in upswing in sardonicism, "and what do you make of the Yoda containment breach we had last year?"

The Yoda was Chris' pet name for the Iota-Hunters, the deadliest version of Hunter at that time which was named after the 9th letter of the Greek alphabet. Carlos accidentally spilled Cooco-Soda on a control panel when he was visiting some buddies in Sub-Basement 17, where the B.O.W.'s were contained, and the Iota Hunters had to be taken down with FN SCAR-H battle rifles that were kept in reserve at the armory because the P90's 5.7 round proved to be ineffectual at penetrating the Yoda's thick epidermis in spite of the guarantee that it could penetrate armor in spite of its small caliber and Carlos had to haul ass to get in and out of the elevators. The elevator rides, themselves, took agonizing eternities to reach the 15th floor and he was frequently interrupted by janitors, scientists, and gift shop clerks who were unaware of the containment breach and would interrupt his task by making trips to other floors that took priority over Carlos' more ugent task. Once, one of the employee's kids who was there on bring-your-daughter-to-work day pressed all of the buttons so they'd go to every floor before the 15th and Carlos could only fidget impatiently for the elevator to make its eternal trip to the 15th floor as though he really needed to go to the bathroom while he was riding it. He actually did have to relive himself once and that proved effective when the little brat showed up again, threatening to press all of the buttons again, she took one whiff of the elevator car and couldn't stand the smell of Carlos' marked territory so she steered clear of it. He eventually got back to Sub-Basement 17 and put all of the escaped Yodas down but several researchers who had dual-major doctorates were killed, including this really cute scientist named Cindy that Carlos had a crush on, and they were all very hard to replace.

"Uh... it was an act of God, señor?"

"I can telepathically smell bullshit and blasphemy from a mile away, Sancho. And you're not getting that raise."

Carlos looked down in shame.

A moment later, the elevator's doors opened and Ethan's ex-wife, Alexis, stepped out wearing a different outfit from the one she wore earlier today. It was a cropped top pantsuit that exposed her midriff and her pierced navel adorned with jewels that she thought were diamonds but Wesker's X-virus infection allowed him to be able to discern the difference between real and imitation gems of all kinds and these were really cubic zirconiums that would lose their luster as fast as her belly button would gather lint.

She wore a white jacket that had only one button on it and was really more of a glorified long-sleeved bra that flaunted her chest, which she had gotten augmented to be larger since anybody at the facility last saw her, and her professionally-tailored lacy push-up bra that made anything that could be found in a Victoria's Secret catalog look like cheap hookerware from the Dollar Tree.

She wore matching bellbottom pants with a gaudy belt around her waist that was embedded with white sapphires that she naturally thought were more diamonds. And, she had uncomfortable-looking, high-heeled sandals on that would have looked like extra bones on her skeleton had the rest of her body not been covered by her skin and muscle tissue.

She ran over to the others demurely. No other woman would have been able to run in those sandals without breaking a heel but Alexis' x-virus infection allowed her to sprint for long distances over untamed terrain and step lightly without ever ruining her shoes or feeling discomfort from her breasts.

"Well, it's nice of you to show up, Alexis. Did you have fun with Ethan?"

"I hardly find it amusing to make light of him punching me in the breast. I had to fly all the way to my gynecologist in Beverly Hills to get it examined and he said that the damned thing exploded like a water balloon."

She placed one hand on her hip and continued her story, "and I've had to pay my plastic surgeon a suitcase full of unmarked $100 bills to suck out all of the leaked silicone and replace the broken one with a new one but then I felt weird having an implant that was older than the other one co-existing in my chest so I had to give the surgeon another suitcase full of money to get the other one replaced."

She placed her other hand on her other hip. She bent her knees and pivoted her hips slightly, "But then my breasts turned out to be a size too big so I had to fly my helicopter back to Isla del Muerte so I could grab three more suitcases and then fly over to LA to buy a new wardrobe at Des Kohan,"

She locked her knees, moved one leg out, and made a theatrical twirl to show off her white cropped top pantsuit, the dangling fake jewels on her navel piercing jangled as she turned, "and, after that, I had to fly back here again to gather up my old wardrobe and throw it all into the crater of Mt. Shasta but then I got parched after all that hard work so I had to go over my favorite Starbucks on Crenshaw Boulevard and, after I paid the peasants forming the queue in front of me to leave, I only had enough money for seven cotton candy frappucinos. I would hardly call that fun at all, I could have bought this other cute cropped-top pantsuit that they had in Shiny Shamrock Green and twenty frappucinos if it wasn't for him!"

"What are you going on about?" Chris was thoroughly bored by the story of this woman's frivolous and vainglorious frittering of a fine Saturday morning, "Weren't you taking Ethan up to your penthouse so you could play some of your creepy S&M games with him?"

"No, I wouldn't have had time to do that today. Just what the devil are you talking about?"

Chris explained his earlier encounter with what he thought was Alexis holding Ethan in a submissive stance.

Alexis was sure that Chris must have been seeing things, "Perhaps it was merely a hallucination you had. You know, you really need to stop imbibing your alcohol with LSD and act like a goddamned professional!"

"That's what you said earlier! You know, and I also got cut off when I was about to tell you-"

A loud bang was suddenly heard from the stairwell and they all snapped their heads toward its direction and saw Lucas burst through its door. He was frantically running up to them like a naked fat kid covered in wet paste and raw pulp trying to run from a swarm of wasps, holding his cowboy hat down on his head as if it was about to blow away in a twister, that bane of grubby trailer parks everywhere, "OH FUCK ME WITH A JACKELOPE'S ANTLERS IN MY URETHRA! DID ANY OF YOU KNOW WHERE THE HELL JILL AND ETHAN WENT?!"

"WHAT?!" Wesker shouted hysterically, "WHY DIDN'T YOU CALL ME ON MY CELL PHONE!?"

"Chill out, ol' hoss, I tried calling you. But, your phone batteries were deader than a dehydrated prospector in a mine shaft full of coyotes!"

Wesker pulled his ruggedized Blackberry out from his breast pocket, "Damn, you're right. I'll be right back: I need to jumpstart this device with the battery from one of our golf carts." Wesker then ran to the elevator and pressed the button for the motor pool.

"Welp, guess he can't tell us if he knows anything now," Lucas turned his attention to Alexis, "so, Alexis Pajitnov, did you see anything surspicious today?"

"I was getting my implants repaired in LA so I had no idear (a/n: West Country dialects from the southwest peninsula of England have highly irritating quirks such as pronouncing 'r' sounds at the end of words not spelled with an 'r' ['paw' as 'pawr'] or pronouncing simple words like 'go,' 'no,' and 'dew' with extra vowels, mutating them into 'gouer,' 'nouer,' 'deeeeeeeeeeyew') that Winters was taken out of his cell until just a moment ago."

"Oh my God, I just realized something!" Chris' eyes widened with panic. "I was talking to Jill Valentine in the elevator! She had Ethan with her!"

"What?! You fool! Why didn't you stop them?!" Alexis' voice tightened up as she made her shouting more forceful.

"Hey, give me a break: I thought it was you. Plus, I was totally shit-faced at the time. And, besides, like what the Butcher Babies always say: all blondes look the same to me."

"How dare you, you racist!" Alexis sounded like Queen Victoria if she had not said her famous 'I am not amused' remark with dignity but screamed it as she was getting arrested while high on PCP, wearing an oversized My Chemical Romance t-shirt with missing pants and shoes, and eyeliner running down her face as she was ugly-crying, swearing profusely at the police officers.

"Aw, shucks!" exclaimed Lucas, "why don't you two get married in the chapel on Sub-Basement 5 later if you wanna argue: we got more important things to take care of!"

Chris and Alexis shut their mouths and Wesker reappeared with a freshly charged Blackberry.

"Indeed," said Wesker, "Considering how the combined floorspace of this facility covers 500 square kilometers: they could be anywhere within this maze of a facility and I see no means by which we can figure out their location."

"I may have an idea on how to get those two back into their containment areas," Carlos said. He had been standing off to the side for a little while, observing their stormy conversation, "we could check the security camera footage to see what happened to them."

"You're suggesting we look at things in the past in order to achieve something in the present?" Chris said sardonically, "That's the most useless thing I ever heard in my life! Look to the future, you useless former communist guerrilla."

"No, that's a brilliant idea!" said Wesker, "I can't believe I didn't think of it first."

"Oh, come on, you can't be serious." whined Chris, "this guy is totally retarded, he doesn't know what he's talking about!"

"At least he does his job and watches the monitors while you sit in your penthouse trying to smoke paint in a hookah and jacking off to Japanese cartoons about little girls puking into each others' anuses." Alexis said smugly as she clutched her hips with both hands and cattily bounced them back and forth.

"it's called Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Homura Akemi is my waifu! She is pure and would never do anything becoming of a debauched harlot from something like Little Witch Academia!" Chris screamed petulantly while he kept his eyes shut and sullenly gyrated his hips.

"Enough of this insulince!" shouted Wesker, "Carlos, take us to your control room!"

"Sure thing, Boss." said Carlos.

And with that, they (along with a catering boy who needed to board a helicopter to pick up several crates of fresh creme-filled glazed doughnuts from Krispy Kreme to replace the ones in the commissary that went stale five minutes before), filed onto the elevator and rode it to floor zero, where the helipad would be a brisk walk away for the catering boy to make his errand and it also happened to be the same floor where they gave their formal introductions to Ethan. They then hit the button for floor 29, where the security monitors were.

When they made it into the control room: Chris wasted no time in poring through the security camera footage.

"Haha! I love viewing monitors!" said Chris. "It makes me feel like an omniscient God to watch these insignificant shoobies gaggling about their business. As David Byrne once said: 'I'm a television man; I'm watching everything!' haha-haha!"

"Well," Carlos said, winding up a nagging tirade against Chris, "it seems you don't love viewing monitors as much as you love shooting at defenseless gimps. It'd be nice for you to come in once in a while to take the workload off of my back. This shit is boring as all hell, pendejo!"

"Hahaha! Oh, Carlos, the way you throw in random Aztec words into your sentences; always delights me." Chris said with amusement.

"Come on, get moving!" shouted Lucas, "I'm getting more impatient than a rutting March Hare that wants to get in on an interracial relationship with a cocktease Jackelope."

"Oh, you and your Jackelopes!" Alexis said contemptuously, "it's not even a real animal!"

"Actually," Wesker piped in to correct her, "several broods of Jackelope were discovered in New Mexico and we've been breeding them as test subjects for our biological agents. We have even made giant versions of them but they had a freak mutation that rid them of their antlers; we've been trying to solve that problem for months."

"Oh, giant versions like Flemish Giants?" She clasped her hands together, momentarily bringing them parallel to her head, and brought them down to waist level as though she had just received a marriage proposal from her longtime crush. "Oh, how charming!" even the black-hearted Alexis, being a woman, could not help but gush at the thought of something so cute.

"No, Alexis, not like Flemish Giants. These things are the size of Toyota Hiluxes and they're not meant to be carried around in your Guchi handbag: they are meant to be Bioweapons, livestock for consumption, and the next evolution in mount technology to replace the antiquated horse. A new era will dawn in which all horses are driven to extinction and a new steed shall take its place as the premier choice for trekking long distances in cattle drives. Once we get in on the cybernetics market as well: we can augment them with more powerful legs and Hemi engines to further increase their horsepower and retrofit them with steering wheels, pedals, seats, and Blu-Ray Players for the comfort of its passengers and we shall replace the automobile, as well! No longer will people have to worry about the perils of parallel parking! They can stop right in front of their destinations and let them run free to where they can't bother anybody until they are called back to their masters with a remote control! It has the potential to revolutionize our daily lives!"

"Ah, right here." Chris found the moment at which Jill broke Ethan out of his cell.

"And here." Carlos found the two moments where Jill got onto the elevator and when she and her hostage got off on the forty-fifth floor.

They watched the footage from the moment Jill first appeared on screen to console the pathetic lump of a man slumped in the corner of his cell. They held a rapt silence until Jill held up the keys she picked off of Wesker. "Ah, clever girl," Wesker commented.

They then observed the escapees ride the elevator. And listened to Chris having an intoxicated kerfuffle with what he thought was Alexis. Everyone in the room glared at Chris who presented his hands and face in a _heh, what're you gonna do?_ gesture.

Finally, they watched the footage of them wandering in circles with Jill holding Ethan's arm behind him. "What are the heck are they doing; strutting around in circles like a catatonic kangaroo with its head cut off?" Lucas said in disbelief.

"They are clearly doing it to misdirect us, don't move your eyes from the screen." said Wesker.

They watched as Ethan and Jill entered the nursery in room 4542.

"Ah, right where we want them. It's no problem if two of them are in the same prison cell together." declared Wesker.

"But I checked that room," said Lucas, "they're not there."

"WHAT?! Get me footage of the nursery!"

"There is no cameras in that nursing room, paisano," said Carlos, "we're going to have to watch this some more and see if they come out."

They watched the footage of the door to room 4542 for a half-hour. Jill and Ethan never came out and they quit watching once they saw Lucas briefly enter the room and then quickly sprint away to the firing range.

"There's a secret passage in there." Wesker said, using inductive reasoning to come to his hypothesis. "it must be connected to the maintenance tunnels."

Wesker pulled out his Blackberry and called the Bioweapons handling facility on sub-basement 17, "What can I do you for, Master Wesker?" a voice on the other end of the line said.

"Release the Lepus into the maintenance tunnels and wake up Plant 44."

"Are you sure? There's lots of maintenance workers who all have master's degrees in Engineering working in those tunnels and they're tough to replace." said the voice on the other end of the line.

"Don't argue with me, Gary, just do it!"

"Okee-Dokee, Master Wesker. Whatever you say; I'm doing it."

"Excellent."

Wesker hung up. He was sending his most terrifying creations after them and they would surely win… However, he still felt he needed more help as Jill was, evidently, not somebody to be trifled with in spite of largely being rendered into a timid, pitiful excuse for an x-virus test subject. He knew where to get the help he needed, though.

"Gentlemen, come with me, I want you to meet my most trusted security personnel."

They made their way to Sub-Basement 3, taking the stairwell to avoid having to deal with anybody who also wanted a ride, but hopping over the railings and free-falling in the empty space that the stairs wrapped around to save time. Their X-virus infections allowed them to make this lethal feat with relative ease but, since Carlos was not infected, he had to sprint down the stairs to Sub-Basement 3. He could run this distance going up without getting winded, or breaking a sweat if he took a cold shower beforehand, but he still felt this was a dick move.

"Giddy up, Slowpoke, what's keeping you?" shouted Lucas.

At least they didn't call him 'Speedy Gonzales'.

"Oh shit, I should have said that, instead, HAHAHA!"

Damn telepaths. Not even your thoughts were safe around them.

When he finally made it down, they actually looked annoyed that he made it because Lucas was playing Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection on his smart phone, Alexis was applying lipstick, and Chris was smoking a Marlboro and now they were interrupted.

They put away their things and Wesker swiped his keycard in the reader to grant him access to the secret storage facility where the secret projects were kept. On this floor, B.O.W.'s that were too difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to produce on a feasible scale or too powerful to have a price tag, were kept here. New versions of the Tyrant, hyper-intelligent variations on the Licker, and other unimaginable horrors were kept in storage. He took his entourage to a room marked "Subjects RCS-001 & RCS-002." Inside, were two tanks filled with a strange, green, preservative marinade containing the bodies of none other than Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield.

"Holy shit," Chris exclaimed, "I know that guy, that's Leon Scott Kennedy! We used to play ping pong together in the break room back at the BSAA headquarters whenever he was visiting from the CIA. Oh, and my sister is here too. Hey, kiddo!"

The Racoon City Survivors, which is what the RCS in their code names referred to, had astoundingly pallid skin and hair that was white as the pure driven snow of the Arctic. Leon had a bowl haircut complimented with a beard while Claire had her hair held up in a ponytail with a scrunchie. And they both wore skintight leather bodysuits that covered every inch of their bodies below the dog collar-like chokers on their necks and were adorned with many belts and studded with spikes to give them an intimidating, but sexy, appearance.

"Damn," said Chris, a little frightened by both of them but, also, a little aroused by his sister who looked sufficiently different enough for him not to be affected by the Westermarck effect, "I think I share Al Jourgensen's sentiments when he said 'Why are you dressed like it's Halloween? You look so absurd, you look so obscene' and, not only that, but you look like a couple of goddamned Cenobites!"

"It is to strike fear in their enemies," Wesker said as he pressed a blue button on a control panel. The marinade started to drain away. "And what better means to demoralize a former friend than to dress up like a demon before going for her throat? Heh heh heh."

When the tanks were completely emptied, Leon and Claire opened their eyes. Their irises were cherry red. They thrust their palms against the glass, shattering their prisons, and stepped out. Wesker's goons cowered before them.

"Do not be alarmed," Wesker said, "They obey whatever we command them to do."

"I'll believe that when I see it 'cuz I sez youze a bigger liar than a snake oil salesman in a gypsy carnival!" declared Lucas. "If they really will do whatever we tell 'em then let me try this. LEON! STAND ON ONE FOOT OR WHATEVER!"

Leon stood motionless.

"You can't just do it that way. You have to command them in a cockney accent." He turned his attention to Leon, "Oy, stranja! You mind standin' on one foot there, roit quick, for a snippet, yeah?"

Leon stood on one foot.

"¿Qué?" Carlos said in surprise.

Wesker wasted no time in giving an impromptu orientation on his most trusted assassins.

"You are, all, well aware of how Leon bumbled his way into a dilapidated rustic community, wading ankle-deep through cow feces, but ending up dismantling a small-time cult with high-tech laboratories and military ordnance on a nearby island, completely by accident, and rescuing the president's daughter on his noble jetski as an after-thought. However, what you people may not be aware of, was that he wouldn't have succeeded had it not been for my assistance!"

Wesker could tell they understood well enough. He needed Leon to succeed at that time in order to get the Plaga sample for his Ouroboros project.

"During his infamous rescue mission: I went by the alias of Alistair Winchester and disguised myself as a traveling merchant. I sold him all the firepower he needed to take out Los Illuminados. Observe now as I command our former enemies to take out our escaped hostages!"

Wesker then turned to face Leon and Claire, "Ello, stranjas," the cenobites' heads pivoted towards the sound of his voice while the rest of their bodies stood completely motionless, "it's mae, your old fren', Alisteh' Winchesta'!"

"Heyyyy, maaaan..." they said in unison, sounding as though they were tranquilized with Rohypnol.

"I'm your best mate, innit roit?"

"Yeeeeesss..."

"Do a fayva for an old chum, then. I wawnt you to kill 'eez two nob'edz that's escaped from their enclowzhas: Won Ethan Win'uhs an won Jeel Valentoin! Youze bowthz go git'im and taych'im wot for, eh wot?"

"Surrrreee..."

"Eh heh heh heh heh, Thaynk ye!"

Leon and Claire immediately sprinted past his goons with such unreal speed and grace that their arms followed limply behind them like Sonic the Hedgehog.

"And wid' dat," said Wesker, changing his accent to his normal speaking voice, "I bid thee, farewell."

Wesker turned his attention to his compatriots.

"You can all take a well-deserved respite," said Wesker, "I got it handled. I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong but, just in case, you will all be on standby. So, keep your phones charged."

They all took a moment to check the batteries on their phones as Wesker walked out of the room and made his way to his penthouse. With all that had happened today, he really needed to kick back, relax in his whirlpool, and drink some Pinot Noir, which, he knew to be the fanciest wine in the world because he saw Sideways at its Chinese theater premier. He could afford to have some R&R because was sure to prevail.

In spite of his relative confidence, however, he learned to pay attention to every angle where Murphy's Law could possibly rear its ugly, auspicious head like a paranoid neurotic. And he had a feeling that Ethan could prove to be a real pain in his neck before his end came. Perhaps, the worst he could expect from Ethan would be that he would, somehow, do enough damage to this facility that would cost the new Umbrella hundreds of Duodecillions of euros in a last act of defiance.

Chump change, he was sure to succeed this time no matter what Ethan or Jill did. After all, he was a god. And how could they kill a god? What a grand and intoxicating innocence one must have to think that. How could anybody be so naive? There would be no escape, no recall, no intervention that could work in his domain. If they were smart: they would lay down their weapons because it was not too late for his mercy.


	9. Chapter 9

The air was completely black and was kept precisely at room temperature. Had Ethan been alone and standing completely still: there would have been no sound. The lack of any stimulation to his five senses would have been so disorienting that he would have stumbled and fallen flat on his face. He would have been alone in the dark, paralyzed from the crippling anxiety of inhuman beasts lurking within it, and with only the pain of his broken nose and the sounds of his pathetic whimpering and crying stimulating his senses of touch and hearing preventing him from feeling the torment of sensory-deprivation-induced vertigo.

But Ethan was not alone. His hand was being held tightly by Jill Valentine and she was leading him through a complicated labyrinth of corridors and air vents to an escape from this island of death. Occasionally, she would have to carry him on her back like a baby koala when they were climbing or descending long ladders or leaping across perilous chasms because Ethan was so incapable of seeing in the dark that he could have easily fallen at several points in their slog, had it not been for her X-virus infection allowing her to see in the dark. Although, she promised that she would give him a flashlight if she saw one, so far, they never found one. However, Ethan knew she had other means of illumination at her disposal...

"Hey, Jill, why don't you breathe some fire so I can see where I'm going?"

"I am worried that there could be flammable gases in the air."

Like propane? Why would she have been worried about that? Couldn't she smell it?

"It's not propane that I'm worried about. There could be colorless or odorless gases in the air. Well, I'm not exactly worried about _those_ because they do actually have odors and colors; my X-virus infection allows me to smell butane and see ethylene in a new color that I never would have imagined before I got infected. But, since it's dark in here, I'm not able to see ethylene and I don't want to take any chances."

But couldn't she see the ethylene in this new color since she could see in the dark anyway?

"I can't see the full color spectrum in the dark. I can only perceive this place in shades of cyan and that means I can't see certain vapors or mists, either. I can't even see the mist coming out of a First Aid Spray's nozzle."

Ethan's fears were not soothed. He was worried that there could be monsters crawling out of the woodwork at any minute.

"Don't worry, Ethan, I don't think there's anywhere in this place where BOW's can make an entry. We just have to keep moving and before you know it-"

The lights flashed on.

"Oh, it looks like we won't need to find a flashlight for you, after all." said Jill.

The corridor was a strange sight to behold. The floor was a metallic checkerboard of brown and black tiles while the walls and ceiling were a spaghetti-pile of valves, conduits, and pipes coiled around each other like a rat king's collection of tails that formed a great chaotic serpent of industrial detritus. Looking at this place almost made Ethan wish the lights had never come on. What if there had been something wrong with these things and the facility's bosses had to call a plumber or electrician to fix this stuff?

"You need a doctorate in engineering with at least ten years of experience as a master tradesman in order to work in these tunnels."

Wouldn't workers like that have been old and wracked with arthritis by the time they would qualify to work on Isla del Muerte's maintenance tunnels?

"Not always, but Wesker and his goons make sure to slip some pills into their mashed potatoes which contain a modified strain of X-virus that they call 'M-virus'. It reverses the aging process and rejuvenates the muscles, with all of the health benefits of a deep tissue massage, but it doesn't turn them into zombies, peons, or ganados. Skilled labor is too valuable of an asset to be wasted on a transformation like that of a human turning into a peon."

Ethan would have liked to know more about these tunnels but he was more anxious to check out Carlos' caches.

"Yes, it's not too far away. Come with me, it's this way!"

After one right turn, they found a closet marked, and thus it was written, '¡CARLOS'S VESTIDOR DE PAJA! ¡LARGATE SI NO ERES YO!'

Jill opened the door hastily, but gently. "In here, quickly!" Jill whispered harshly as she yanked Ethan inside and shut the door behind her.

Jill flipped a light on. Her hand withdrew from the string that hung from the bulb dangling from the ceiling. Other than a mop that was resting inside a plastic bucket with rollers on it, the closet was completely empty.

"Cover your eyes: I'm going to break this board down."

Ethan had not noticed a board.

"I mean, this board covering the entrance to Carlos' cache." she patted the wooden wall on the dead center of its Cinnamon Toast Crunch swirl.

Ethan then understood that, when Jill broke down the wall, splinters would be flying from the impact of Jill's strike, and they would surely find a means to embed themselves in his eyes. He turned his back to the board and covered his face with his hands.

PEW!

"Okay, Ethan, you can uncover your eyes, now."

Pew? Ethan had expected a loud crash with chunks of balsa wood clattering on the ground after Jill would have punched it.

"Oh, I wasn't going to punch it. You see, my X-Virus infection allows me to shoot lasers from my eyes that disintegrate wood. I just needed you to cover your eyes because they're thirty times more damaging to the eyes than arc welding."

Wouldn't that have meant she would be blind when she shot them?

"Yes, but only for a few seconds. I'm able to regenerate my eyesight after such trauma. Anyway, I'm going to take a look inside so don't go anywhere, okay, Ethan?"

Jill stepped into the hidden room. No light could be seen. A moment later, Jill had flipped on a halogen work light, revealing a stockpile of olive drab-colored storage chests. Jill went to the largest of them and tried to open its padlock. However, in spite of her Herculean strength, she struggled to open it. She gasped when she inspected it.

"Oh no!" hopelessness crept into Jill's voice, "I forgot that we needed the Delorean key to open these boxes! We're completely defenseless now!"

"It's okay," said Ethan. "I got it right here!"

He presented it to Jill, holding it between his thumb and forefinger like a boyfriend posing for a photograph by making it look like he was pinching the sun.

Jill gave a primal scream of relief and leapt toward Ethan. She gave him a bear hug, lifting him up in the air as though she were about to suplex him, and popping her foot like she was being passionately kissed.

"OOOOHH! ILOVEYOUILOVEYOUILOVEYOUILOVEYOU I L-O-V-E Y-O-U!" She shouted frantically as she swung Ethan around in a ballroom dance that was as friendly, and rough, as a Texas handshake.

Ethan was surprised at how gentle she was. By all means, she should have been crushing him with her superhuman strength. But he did not feel as though his ribs were being crushed nor did his skull ache from being spun. Actually, he felt like he had just been given a soul and a boundless desire to seize happiness for himself, as though he had just woken up from a restless dream where he was an empty automaton stalked by dark figures, hiding in the background like Bunraku puppeteers that controlled his every movement, that he would soon, and gladly, forget.

Jill delicately placed Ethan on the floor and took the Delorean from him. She skipped to each of the chests and lockers and opened them.

Within each of them was the wet dream of an enthusiastic defender of the 2nd Amendment. The largest chest contained an RPG-7D with ten 40mm HEAT warheads, a Panzerfaust 3 with ten 60mm warheads, a Metal Storm 3GL with 20 40mm grenades, and a Gepard M6 with three magazines, already loaded with 14.5mm cartridges.

The next largest contained an RPK-74, configured as a cost-effective designated marksman rifle, with a PSO-1 telescopic sight, a bipod, and small magazines which only barely exceeded the length of the trigger group to make it more comfortable to shoot from a prone position. Jill explained to Ethan that Carlos had the idea to use, what was normally a squad automatic weapon. as a sniper rifle because it was actually less than satisfactory in its intended role due to it having a habit of overheating too fast. However, what separated it from a regular AK-74 was its longer and heavier barrel and the 5.45x39mm round it was chambered for was just as aerodynamic as a 5.56x45mm round but did more damage through tumble and yaw than its NATO counterpart, thus earning it the nickname of 'the poison bullet'. He specifically wanted to use this 'poison bullet,' rather than the more common 5.56, because it did more damage while still being less lethal than other assault rifle rounds.

"Why would he want a bullet that was less lethal? Isn't the point of a gun to kill people?" asked Ethan.

"I asked him the same question." said Jill. "He told me that it was more damaging to the enemy in the grand scheme of things to injure, rather than kill, a combatant because it costs more to treat his injury than to bury him."

And, the nastier a bullet wound, the more expensive it would be to treat it.

"Precisely," said Jill.

The next chest contained two P90's and four Five-seveN's; logical choices as every Peon in the facility was armed with them.

The chest after that one contained a Heckler and Koch G41, chambered for 5.56 and compatible with the M16's STANAG magazines.

Ethan opened another chest and found a rifle that he thought was an AK-47.

"Actually, that's a Vzor 58 from the former Czechoslovakia." explained Jill, "it's more comfortable to shoot and performs better overall than the Soviet AKM. But, it takes different magazines in spite of being chambered for the same 7.62x39mm caliber."

Why did Carlos think it was necessary to pack different intermediate calibers in these things when 5.56 would do the job just fine?

"He has this obsessive compulsion to keep one gun for every caliber." said Jill. "He rationalizes it by saying it's like having different golf clubs that are ideal for the right situation."

And, true to his mentality, another case contained a CZ-75, a 1911 manufactured by Les Baer, a Smith and Wesson Model 10, a Ruger Redhawk, a Ruger Blackhawk, a Ruger Super Redhawk, a Ruger Super Blackhawk, a Kolibri car pistol, a duck's foot pistol (with eight barrels, a heavily spiked butt, and a little bayonet attached to it), a pepperbox with 32 barrels, and a Desert Eagle (which Ethan threw away because it was a worthless, wrist-cracking range toy for wankers) which were chambered for 9mm parabellum, .45 ACP, .38 Special, .357 magnum (also compatible with .38 Special, making the inclusion of the Model 10 all the more baffling), .41 Magnum, .44 Magnum, .454 Casull, 2.7mm, .36 caliber, .32 caliber, and .50 Action Express, respectively.

"How come this guy doesn't have anything chambered in .40 Smith and Wesson?" asked Ethan.

"He says bringing that round to a gunfight is like bringing a tennis racket to a golf game." said Jill.

Well, it might have worked well enough for Happy Gilmore.

"No, it wouldn't because Happy Gilmore used a hockey stick." said Jill.

Whatever.

The next chest contained an FN Mag 58 chambered for 7.62x51mm and a PKM for 7.62x54mm. General purpose machine guns with comparable performances and too heavy for Ethan to lug around so what was the point?

"I can hold them akimbo. I know that they're both chambered for different rounds but I don't plan on reloading them anyway." Jill said in a reassuring voice.

Ethan guessed that she was able to dual wield them like Chow Yun Fat because her X-virus infection gave her the strength necessary to-

"How did you know?" asked Jill, genuinely surprised.

The next chest contained grenades: green for fragmentation, blue for flashbang, and red for incendiary. Enough for everybody in the facility by virtue of the fact that peons would leave behind grenades for Ethan and Jill to loot off of.

Ethan pulled out another chest that contained a wide variety of 19th-century plinking guns chambered for obsolete conical ball cap rimfire ammunition like 6mm Flobert, novelty rifles chambered in overpowered calibers like .577 Tyrannosaur and .950 JDJ, Japanese small arms from the Pacific Theater of World War II, another 2.7mm Kolibri car pistol, another duck's foot pistol with only four barrels, and another pepperbox with 58 barrels that Carlos must have made himself because there was no historical evidence of pepperboxes being made with this many barrels.

The last chest contained shotguns: two SPAS-12's with folding stocks and butt hooks to allow for dual-wielding and a SPAS-15 with magazines for 12-gauge slugs and a variety of specialty ammo like Dragon's Breath, Bean Bag, and Capsicum rounds and a particularly exotic weapon called a KS-23. A rifled shotgun chambered for 23x75mmR cartridges that was made from a barrel rejected for use in an Anti-Aircraft gun but repurposed for this weapon. It came with Zvesda (flashbang), Siren-7 (tear gas with CS agent), Barricade (meant to destroy engine blocks in cars), and Shrapnel-25 (buckshot with a 25-meter effective range) cartridges.

"I doubt we will need all of this," said Jill, "but it is nice of Carlos to keep this stuff here. He has caches like this throughout the facility."

With all of this ordinance at their disposal: there would no longer be any pussy-footing around. They could walk straight to the helipad and escape from this residence of evil.

"Ethan," her voice was assertive, militant, ready to scorch the earth, "I know what you're thinking, but we can't leave this place. Not until Wesker, Lucas, your ex-wife Olivia, and… And…" she swallowed hard, finding it almost physically impossible to utter his name, "Chris... Not until they all pay for the damage they have done to this world. And we must see to it that this facility gets destroyed in a cathartic explosion." her use of a pretentious word like 'cathartic' almost made her sound like Wesker.

"Jill, hold on," Ethan touched her shoulder, "I'm thinking, maybe, we shouldn't blow this place up."

Jill firmly placed her hand on his, "Ethan, why would you not want to see this place destroyed? Nothing but evil can come of this island."

Ethan stacked his other hand on top of hers, "Jill, you're a product of this island, as well, and you're not evil. We can take the Umbrella's tools for ourselves and use it to benefit the world."

Jill seemed to be about to say something. But, instead, she exhaled and relaxed her muscles. Her gaze lost its fiery fervor and her voice softened.

"I don't know, Ethan," she said, casting her gaze off to the side, away from Ethan, "these experiments Wesker subjected me to may have made me a super human but they certainly haven't done wonders for my psyche. It's just not right; humanity was never meant to toy with nature like this."

"I won't argue that mankind has the potential to abuse science the way Wesker has," Ethan squeezed his hands a little firmer and Jill looked back into his eyes, "but I believe God gave us the ability to manipulate nature to our liking to see if we would use it, virtuously, to lift each other up; knowing, full well, that He also risked seeing us use it to bring each other down."

Jill stared back intensely. She kept her face blank, so she wouldn't betray any of her feelings about Ethan's opinions, and he could sense that she didn't want him to be discouraged from talking.

Ethan continued, "And, sure, so far Wesker has abused God's gift to us for his own selfish desires but I believe we can redeem ourselves, use Wesker's research to clean up after him and save more lives than he has taken, and prove ourselves to be worthy of God's trust with this technology so that we may be ready to advance ourselves further into a better world."

Jill cast her eyes down again, "Well, I don't believe in a God, myself. But, I've been through enough experiences to know that nature was meant to be respected and not manipulated for anyone's benefit. Too often, mankind's greed and hubris overrides his virtue and good intentions. If we're ever ready for the technology Umbrella has created: it won't be within our lifetimes. Perhaps, we can prove that we are worthy of God's trust but can we prove that we are worthy of the trust of our fellow man?"

Ethan could not be sure if Jill was going to be steadfast in her desire to destroy the Isla Del Muerte facility. judging by her body language, however, this was probably something she would need to think about.

Unfortunately, she wouldn't have time to think about it at that moment because the room was rumbling as though there was an earthquake of biblical proportions tearing the room apart.

"Hey, what's going on!" Jill yelled.

The floor was rendered asunder and great cracks appeared in the floor, swallowing chests and weapons into their ever-widening maws.

"Ethan! Grab onto me, quick! My X-virus infection will allow me to land on my feet like a cat!"

Ethan wasted no time in embracing her and Jill jumped ten feet into the air as the floor below her opened up. She allowed herself to fall into the void and prepared to stick the landing wherever the hole would lead her.


	10. Chapter 10

They fell for hours, at least, to Ethan, it seemed like hours, and their plummet to the Center of the Earth (a/n: don't worry, they're not really at the center of the earth; it's just the foundation beneath the facility; it barely even scratches the crust) was surely going to pulverize their bodies into pico de gallo once they hit solid ground. The trust Ethan had put in Jill to keep him alive left his body and flew to Heaven, leaving panic in his nerves. Why, oh, why the hell did he believe Jill could fall this far and be perfectly fine, how could he be so stupid as to–

They stopped.

"Hold on, Ethan," Jill said, "there's rocks coming down at us, I have to dodge them."

She played a deadly game of high stakes hopscotch with the gigantic boulders of concrete that plummeted from the world above. One of them hurtled down toward them like an MZKT-79221 mobile launcher (a/n: you know, one of those gigantic trucks that the soviets used to launch SCUD missiles? I wish I had one of those; it'd be pretty boss to drive it down the highway even though I could only stop at Wal-Mart parking lots) leaping off of the Cliffs of Dover at the command of its psychotic driver and threatened to become their tombstone until Jill ran up the wall and backflipped onto this towering obelisk.

"Here, Ethan, use these!" Jill had apparently caught some of the weapons that fell from the ceiling: including, and limited to, the G41, a couple of its STANAG magazines, and some grenades, one red and one green. Jill, herself, was holding the SSK Fat Mac.

Their eyes adjusted to the darkness and the horrific visage of a four-story tall Rafflesia arnoldii with a Venus Flytrap mouth that fell perpendicular to its flower face so its sets of 'teeth' were on the left and right sides like some mutant slit from outer space, numerous giant, girthy vines that whipped back and forth like tentacles threatening to molest a girl in a hentai film, and big googly eyes. The plant creature roared its sickening Godzilla screech and its many pitcher plant appendages that some of its vines held like Pepsi cans hovered towards Jill and Ethan, looming ever closer like alien saucers coming to abduct them so their crews could probe them for their perverse, quasi-scientific, sexual curiosities.

Jill took aim with her .950 JDJ rifle and squeezed the trigger once. Immediately, Ethan's ears popped out and a horrifying ring resonated throughout his ears that radiated into his skull. He was able to catch a glimpse of Jill grabbing onto her shoulder, wincing in pain, and her rifle flying out of her hands because of its sheer recoil as he crouched down and covered his ears, dropping his G41 over the edge. He was unable to hear his own screams amidst the conflagration of noise in his own brain.

Jill's own ears were fine after a few seconds but, when she saw Ethan curled up in the fetal position with his hands on his ears and his pants stained with the fluids of his own cowardly bladder, her maternal instincts kicked into overdrive, she heaved him up, cradled him in her arms, and leaped towards a sheltered hole she spotted among a ravine of fallen debris.

One of the monster's vine nearly grabbed her by the leg but she was able to dive into the hole as a runaway pinball dives into an outlane. The vine tried to reach into the hole to grab the two but Jill had freed one of her hands to rapidly burrow into the rubble and she made a 45-degree turn and tunneled upwards to make a sinus that the vine would be no more capable of reaching than a finger would be capable of scratching the brain through the nose. That's not to say that the vine did not try to reach them, however. Jill could see the tip of the vine patting around the lip of the sinus' portal like Bugs Bunny's hand patting around the mouth of his rabbit hole for a carrot. She held tight onto Ethan and watched the vine wander around.

Her foot was too close to the hole. The vine was about to touch it. She lifted her foot to the ceiling. The vine passed by and made a frustrated gesture as if to say, 'Dagnab it, they're gone!' and slinked off.

Jill could finally relax her muscles and laid Ethan down. The sinus made an incline for him to rest as comfortably as one could on solid granite. She pulled off Ethan's shirt and covered his face with it so that she could dig a higher ceiling for herself without getting any dust in Ethan's orifices. When the ceiling was high enough for her to work without bumping her head she then hovered over Ethan and used her telepathy to diagnose his injuries.

Reading Ethan's mind was like being piss-drunk on a constantly spinning merry-go-round at a Death Grips concert. Although Ethan could not think in intelligible words, the buzzing tones and nauseous spinning sensations that Jill could vicariously feel told her everything she needed to know. The JDC 950 round she fired was loud enough to rupture Ethan's inner ear and he was suffering from tinnitus and vertigo. Nothing on Earth could cure him of the agony Ethan was suffering from. Nothing, except, Jill's X-virus infected saliva.

She lifted Ethan's shirt off of his face and held it over the portal to shake the dust off of it. She then crawled up to Ethan's right ear, close enough to french-kiss it, and gathered all of the saliva and phlegm from her throat. She expelled it. The spittle raced into his ear and Jill flipped his head over to do the same to his other ear. To help her produce more saliva, Jill pulled a Snickers bar from her cleavage and took her time to chew on it. She grimaced while she ate it because, being pocketed in her well-endowed breasts had caused the candy bar to become melted but she endured the unpleasant, smooshie texture for Ethan's sake. When she got a good glob of spit ready, she expelled it into his left ear.

After a few moments: Ethan's eyes fluttered in wonder.

"My tinnitus and vertigo are gone! I can hear again!" cried Ethan, "It's a miracle! What the hell did you do, Jill?"

"I spit in your ears," Jill explained, "My saliva can repair damage to the inner ear because of my X-virus infection."

"You mean," Ethan was frightened to say what had to come next, "I'm infected?"

"No, the X-Virus isn't transmissible through salivary or sexual contact: it needs to be coated in a special protein casing of lots of different viruses and parasites before it can infect a host."

Jill grabbed onto Ethan's hand, "but, anyway, let's go outside to kill this plant monster. I saw you drop your gun off of the tower thing we were just on; I'll grab it for you. follow me!"

Jill jumped down through the sinus' portal and scurried off, crawling in a lizard-fashion like Dracula along his walls. Ethan followed her lead through the portal but could only manage an awkward duck-walk in the tunnel back to the open air. After a dozen steps or so, Jill appeared before him with the G41 he dropped.

"Here you go, Ethan, I found it," she said, "come on, I'll give you a piggyback ride. I'll just hold my arms up into the ceiling so I can make clearance for you head."

She turned around and crouched to allow Ethan to hitch himself up on her back. When he was saddled up: Jill rose up, threw her fists into the ceiling, and started sprinting for the entrance. Within a moment, Jill and Ethan shot out of the tunnel like a slug from a .45 and were now flying through the air.

The plant creature caught sight of them and brought its lumbering vine within their path. Ethan saw that the vine was about to whip them to the ground and shut his eyes.

FLAP. WHOOSH.

Ethan opened his eyes again just in time to see Jill bank to the right and do a barrel roll with a pair of vestigial wings she spontaneously sprouted so that she could maneuver like a flying squirrel or gliding lizard. And, with the gentle grace of a falling rose petal, they landed on a nearby mound of rubble. Ethan jumped off of Jill's back.

"Holy crap, Jill," shouted Ethan, "why didn't you tell me you could fly?"

"I had no idea that I could," said Jill as she shed her wings, "I did that completely by accident. I'm discovering new things about my body all of the time."

Her jumpsuit fell apart in two pieces, exposing her set of purple Victoria's Secret-brand plunge bra, v-string panties, and fishnet stockings. Her vestigial wings worked like a wingsuit so they attached her arms to her legs and the newly-formed skin had ripped through the fabric of her clothing.

"AAAH! Ethan! Look away while I sew my jumpsuit back on!"

Ethan turned toward the plant creature. Its vines were writhing, it's googly eyes were getting cross, and it was roaring from whatever body parts those noises came from. Within moments, the creature would strike them.

"Okay Ethan, you can look now," She said as Ethan turned to look at her with her jumpsuit, once again, intact as though it had never ripped in the first place, "it's a good thing I always keep a sewing kit on me."

That was a shame. Those purple panties and fishnets were total chub material.

"EEEK!" Jill lifted one of her legs toward her hips and crossed her arms across her chest in a baby gibbon fashion not unlike the protective cowering Ethan did on his helicopter ride to this place, "Pervert!"

Oh, shit. Had Ethan thought that out loud?

Jill's posture relaxed and she giggled, "I'm just kidding! I don't mind if you think of me like that."

Where did she get that lingerie, anyway?

"Carlos has access to your ex-wife, Sheila's, Victoria's Secret catalogs," in his mind, Ethan retched at the mention of his ex-wife's name. Jill continued, "He gives me the ones she puts in her recycling bin and he also gives me a marker so I get to pick out whatever I want!"

Ethan found himself spinning around in the air with a cacophony of noise that sounded like a bundle of dynamite going off. He was unable to realize that Jill caught sight of the plant creature's vine about to crash down on their heads and Jill had latched onto him before springing back out of the path of the oncoming tentacle.

Ethan found himself behind a hill of concrete, out of sight from the monster. As soon as he caught his bearings, Jill related her plan: "Let's split up, I'll take him from the air, you take him from the ground. Find a rocket launcher if you can."

Jill leapt away from Ethan. Ethan caught sight of her catching one of the vines and severing it with a judo chop. Ethan scaled down the mound of rubble, being careful not to get his ankle caught on any of the treacherous, jagged ground that could have spelled a broken nose and two poked-out eyes at best if he had fallen. Since the plant was distracted by Jill, Ethan did not need to worry so much about any vines or hovering pitchers.

A thunderous crack and a flash of lightning suddenly erupted from the plant creature's mouth and struck Jill. However, Jill's jumpsuit was made of rubber and her infection allowed her to redirect the electrical energy she had been bestowed with towards one of the creature's pitchers. It spun around like a Disneyland teacup and fired off its seeds in random directions which exploded in spectacular displays of color and sound, precisely like a salvo of Black Cat Sky Dancer rockets.

"It can shoot lightning," said Ethan, out loud to himself, "I'm really goddamned surprised."

"It might also surprise you to know that I can talk!" the plant creature said in a raspy Howlin' Wolf impression.

"What?!" Ethan was horribly confused. The plant, seeing an opportunity to take advantage of Ethan's distraction, knocked some of the ceiling down with its massive vines, which tore open a new hole in the floors above, causing some of the facility's nightclubs and petting zoos to give way to a torrential downpour of people and animals, including a P-virus infected orangutan dressed up as Santa Claus sitting on a Christmas throne that was holding two children on its knee, who all fell several hundred feet to their deaths, their bodies shattering into ludicrous explosions of gore like water balloons filled with goulash and mushroom soup bursting forth upon impact. Ethan deftly dodged a descending doodad before it could destroy him.

"'What!'" The plant mocked Ethan, "I'll tell you 'what'! I got chlorophyll pumpin' through my veins and a voltaic pile grafted in my brains! And I got's to have me some human flesh or else I'm gonna fade, ya dig?"

"What are you?!" Ethan

"Shit, maaaaan, Wesker's callin' me Plant 49 or sumth'in. Just call me 'Seymour'. It's got a nice ring to it, doncha' think?"

"You don't really have a voltaic pile grafted in your brain, do you, mister Seymour?" Jill asked politely. Since the plant could talk, maybe it could be reasoned with in a civilized manner.

"Awww, hell no!" shouted Seymour, "Umbrella don't do robots and I ain't no cyborg freak-a-nature. I've been genetically engineered to have the kind of electric organ you find in eels and sheeeit."

"Wait!, if you can talk and think like a human being," shouted Jill, "why would you want to follow the commands of an evil monster like Albert Wesker?"

"Fuck, girl, what'chu want from me? As far as I'm concerned: it's a win-win situation. I dispose of a few garbage bags full of shredded documents every week and I get to have some turkeys for dinner and not the kind of turkeys you get for Christmas dinner, I mean the jive kind. Heh heh heh!"

Jill wound up a spinning bird kick, "You eat people?" she said as she then back-flipped upside-down and rotated her legs as fast as a helicopter's rotors, acting as a weed whacker against Seymour's many noodley appendages.`

"Do I look like I can photosynthesize in this place? Of course, I got to eat people!" Seymour's vine-like appendages regrew, "Non-zombified humans are the most viable sources of essential nutrients for me, such as nitrogen, niacin, Vitamin A, and magnesium, and, besides," the vines grew tulip-like beaks that screeched like skidding monster trucks from Hell, "I love the sounds that humans make when they're being slowly digested inside my stomach acids and the feelings they give me when they scratch at my insides gets my stamens into pollen production overdrive, if you know what I mean, heh heh heh."

"I didn't know plants could orgasm." Ethan said as he unloaded an entire STANAG magazine into the creature's pitcher to no avail.

"What can I say?" Seymour said as he tried to bite at Ethan with one of his tulips but he stumbled on a piece of rubble and narrowly avoided getting chomped, "you learn something new everyday. Kind of like how you're both going to learn what it feels like to get your face disintegrated by a carnivorous plant's digestive enzymes! HEH HEH HEH HEH!"

Jill kicked off of one of Seymour's vines and leaped against a wall. Then, she planted her foot firmly against it, positioned herself towards his flower. If this creature could talk then it surely is a plant/animal hybrid with a brain. She shuffled to one of its googly eyes and took a deep breath.

"Oooh, girl, you betta not be doing what I think youze gonna do!" Seymour chided semi-seriously. Jill blew her dragon's kiss and fiery lance thrusted forth from her lips and pierced the eye, melting it into a viscuous, effluvial soup, "YOWWW! Oh, that's it! You're in for it now, bitch!"

Seymour's vines wrapped around Jill's ankle. She yelped in surprise and kicked furiously as the vine craned toward one of the pitchers.

Ethan looked on like a spectator in the nosebleeds of Wrigley Field rooting for the Cubs to start an unbreakable winning streak in next year's World Series. Surely, she would find a means to get out of there.

The vine released her and she tumbled down, shrieking. Her legs kicked out, nailing a perfect splits on the lips of the pitcher plant. For a moment, it looked as though she would be able to launch herself upward and take out more of Seymour's vines but they lashed out and pummeled her into the pitcher trap. She was now sealed inside, swimming in the digestive fluid, and banging on the pitcher's transparent walls.

"Ethan! Don't worry about me, my x-virus infection protects my skin against scalding liquids and my jumpsuit is weaved to accommodate hazardous environments like this so my lingerie will be okay! But, anyway, I put some grenades on your kevlar vest while you weren't looking."

But he wasn't wearing a kevlar vest…

"I put one on you while you weren't looking!"

Ethan looked down at his torso and saw that he was, indeed, wearing one after all. And, just like Jill said, there were two grenades clipped to it: one green, one red.

"Ethan! Listen carefully to my directions!"

He was bad at following directions. His head was always in the clouds where it was easier to tune other people out. He had to concentrate in order to remember people's names when they introduced themselves and, even then, he was lucky to retain their first names because their last names were often weirdo ethnic names that were hand-me-downs from their immigrant ancestors. And not only that, but…

He recoiled at a piercing shriek that sounded throughout the subterranean cavern where this battle was taking place. Vines had been creeping up on him while he was thinking to himself and he had left himself open to them but he was saved by Jill's valkyrie screams and the vines retreated to Seymour's flower-head to cover where his ears would be if he had them.

"Ethan, pay attention! My X-Virus infection allows me to emit supersonic-pitched screams that can improve memory and strengthen retention as well as irritate plants, animals, fungi, protists, and some monera, but not all of them!"

Was it because she could only scare Archaea and not Bacteria?

"Oh, that's right!" Jill slapped herself on the forehead but forgot there was stomach acid on her hand and it seared the skin on her forehead but her healing factor fixed it a moment later, "I'm sorry; when I was in middle school: we got outdated textbooks for science class so I keep forgetting the monera kingdom was split into two domains! Anyway, you have to follow these instructions very carefully, there isn't much time!" She emitted another wail to keep Seymour at bay.

Seymour expressed his displeasure, "Girl! You best be stopping this shit, or I'm going to need to send my vines into the Popeye's on Floor 2 to pick up some Ghost Pepper wings so I can digest you much faster and much badder than I was before!"

There was a Popeye's in this facility? Ethan was super stoked; he had another reason not to advocate for blowing the facility up. If only he had money with which to buy some of Popeye's new ghost pepper wings: he wasn't sure if they were cool with bartering and trading one of his guns for a nice, big ol' bucket of succulent, savory chicken with crispy...

"Ethan! Stop thinking about food and listen! You have to throw the grenades into the two pitcher plants that are blue in color! Ignore the red and green ones!"

Ethan didn't pay attention to the coloration of the pitcher plants but he did see that there were two blue ones that… Seymour was bringing to him… Wait, what the hell was he doing?

"My screams manipulated him into bringing his pitcher plants towards you, I think!"

Seymour interjected, "Actually, I thought I'd humor him by making it a little easy on him. Go ahead boy, try slapping the backboard on these hoops! HEH HEH HEH!"

Without a moment's hesitation, Ethan pulled the pin and chucked the green one towards the mouth of the pitcher plant… And missed. The grenade was a dud, anyway and failed to detonate.

"WEEEELL, now ain't that just too bad! UH-UH-UUUH!" Seymour wagged one of his vines at him, "heh heh heh. But, don't get too down on yourself, you still got one more free throw left!"

Ethan pulled the pin on his last grenade and tossed it directly into the mouth of the pitcher plant to his left. It blew up and engulfed its interior in a brief flash of hellfire… But it had no real effect on it and Seymour remained unperturbed.

"Well, what do you know? That didn't do jack shit! Looks like you suckers are both mine, AHAHAHAHA!"

Seymour laughed hysterically.

Jill tried to scratch the walls of her acid maiden (a/n: that's like an iron maiden but with corrosive chemicals, although it doesn't necessarily have to have acids in it as it can also have caustic bases in it too) with her fingernails. She tried using her x-virus augmented alpha-keratin growth to grow freakishly long fingernails that had purple nail polish on them because her x-virus infection allowed her nail matrices to evolve glands in the cuticles that produced nail polish but they broke against it. She was now reduced to yelping for help like a princess kidnapped by a dragon.

Ethan was not the Prince Charming she needed him to be at that moment. He was powerless to help her and he assumed the fetal position and resigned himself to his fate while Seymour's mocking laughter continued to bounce against the walls...

"Yow!" Seymour sounded a little surprised, "Hey what the-?!"

Ethan's ears perked up. He could hear Seymour in distress and he was yelling like an irascible grandmother, whose grandchildren were only 7-14 years her junior, from Compton demanding a refund at Guadalajara Beauty Salon.

"AAGH! Wesker! You moh-ron! I told you not release the lepuses until I said so! Now I'm getting my ass chomped! Ah, baby, don't let me die! AAAAAGGGH!"

Ethan was afraid to stand up and see just what 'lepuses' were. But he swallowed some imaginary liquid courage and gradually worked up the strength to heft himself a little bit further.

"Ethan, look!" Jill shouted, "It's bunny rabbits! Honest-to-God giant bunny rabbits! They're eating Seymour!"

Ethan leaped up. His eyes darted back and forth to witness this most incredible sight of giant killer rabbits leaping to and fro at Seymour's vines. Some of the rabbits were chowing down on Seymour's flower-face while he continued to scream like free jazz vocalist.

One bunny leaped up to the vine attached to Jill's prison like a dog catching a stick, an impressive feat for a woman like Jill to perform but totally ordinary for a rodent such as itself, and the hatch to Jill's prison opened up as a reflex to the lepus's digging incisors. Jill promptly jumped out, did a triple salchow, a double lutz, and stuck a back-inside-edge landing in front of Ethan.

"Cover you ears, Ethan, I'm going to kill all of these rabbits. I read their minds and they're all BOW's and they're out for blood."

Ethan did as he was told and, in the time it takes to listen to Crackity Jones by the Pixies, various gunshots and audible neck snaps with brief bunny death knells penetrated his just-too-flimsy hands.

"I'm back!" Jill announced, oddly chipper for having just killed a bunch of adorable fluffy varmints.

"Oh, Ethan, when you've killed as many deadly mutants as I have: you need to have a chipper attitude and look on the bright side of things. Otherwise, you might find reasons to stay inside and be a broody-brittany on a warm and sunny summer day!"

Even in within this cavernous chamber of death, Jill was a golden ray of hope and sunshine.

"Ah, Ethan, that's so sweet of of you!" Jill closed her eyes and tilted her head like a doting Doberman puppy.

Ethan appreciated Jill's affection but a verbal acknowledgment would have to wait. They still needed to escape from here and were going to need whatever guns got lost when the floor collapsed.

"I'll do just that, Ethan," Jill said, "hold on!" And, like a phantom, Jill moved to one of the fallen boulders of concrete with such supernatural speed that she seemed to teleport. She wound her fist up above her head and thrust it into the gargantuan chunk of debris. It shattered into dust with a deafening crack and it was followed by another one, and another, each signifying another haymaker. Eventually, the cracks stopped and the dust swirled into a cyclone that spiraled into Jill's mouth like water going down the drain.

What the fuck was that? Ethan could not find the strength to say this but the sentence exploded in his mind like a pile of all the semtex in the world gathered together and painted like an easter egg to look like a mountain of abc bubblegum.

"Oh, let me explain. My X-virus infection makes me strong enough to shatter boulders into fine particles and it also gives me the ability to suck them up like a vacuum."

More like, Kirby.

"Oh, yeah, like Kirby! So, anyway, I can suck them up and my digestive enzymes can liquefy them into a concrete-like substance that I can save for later and then I can regurgitate it to trap bad people who would want to hurt us."

Ethan understood completely. He only wondered where the guns were.

"Oh, they're right here, I even found some blankets to lay them down on so they make a nice little display. Some of them were broken, but I found a workbench that came with all of the tools and manuals I needed next to that dead Orangutan dressed as Santa Claus so I used it to restore them."

She had managed to gather every single weapon and spread them out neatly, with each of their muzzles pointed to Ethan's left, on some blankets like food at a picnic and each weapon even had labels next to it printed with meticulously detailed specifications.

Ethan looked at Jill for a moment and she showed him the marker she used to make them, "It ran out of ink right when I finished the last one."

Ethan went back to scanning the secessionist potluck of small arms. The RPG-7 and Panzerfaust-3 lay on the blankets like meatball subs and their warheads sat next to them like ostrich eggs on kebab sticks. The Vzor 58 was displayed with its finely shellacked wood furniture exposed like a naked Zagnut and the receiver, magazine, and barrel proudly coated with Butterfinger cocoa coating and the Ruger revolvers were like licorice candy sticks placed next to each other in single file like an Amtrak train… But the Desert Eagle, that damned wrist cracker, stuck out like a stainless steel circus peanut…

"Hey," said Ethan. "I deliberately threw away this Deagle because it was a piece of garbage."

"Oops, I'm sorry, let me take care of this." Jill pulled back the Desert Eagle's slide eight times to eject all of its cartridges and put them in her cleavage. She then greedily gorged on the pistol like a sloppy, greasy slice of pizza from a New York street vendor whose ragged used Kleenex of cheese and pepperoni threatened to fall onto the sidewalk and fry in the August sun. As she was chewing on it, she said with her mouth full of steel, "my ekth-viruth infeh-," she gulped. "Sorry. My X-virus infection hardens my teeth, allowing me to chew steel. My digestive enzymes also melts down the steel and I can spit it out later to make origami with it. See, watch!" True to her word, Jill regurgitated some glowing hot molten steel into her hand. She waited for it to turn to a cool, Delorean grey and shaped it into a swan. She then used her fingernails to carve 'FOR ETHAN WITH LOVE,' into one of its wings. "Here you go, Ethan, I made this for you!" She gave him a sweet, dopey smile the sort of smile a bigger-than-average German Shepherd would give to her master after catching a tennis ball, and held her hands together, waiting for his approval.

"Thanks..." said Ethan.

Jill's smile waned and became the kind of despondent countenance of betrayal that that same German Shepherd would make when, having run to retrieve her tennis ball, looked back to see that her master had only used this game of fetch as a pretense for distracting her so he could go inside his house without having her rush in and make a nuisance of herself. Tears began to drip from her eyes, making her eyeliner run a little, "...YOU DON'T LIKE IT?"

"It's beautiful… It's just..." Ethan couldn't finish his sentence.

"You haven't met many girls who were also refineries, huh?" Jill said.

"No, no! You got it all wrong! You see," his voice fried a little, "I... just... love it when a girl is full of surprises and I'm thinking..."

"That I might be the one and you've been too shy to say it!?"

"...Yeah."

Jill ran up to Ethan and hugged him like a cuddly boa constrictor, "Oh Ethan, you're the most wonderful man I've ever met and I want to get married to you and have lots of beautiful children with you RIGHT NOW!"

That actually sounded great to Ethan. It was too bad that Jill was unable to have children.

Jill's embrace slackened. Ethan wrapped his arm around her and pulled her in and Jill's embrace tightened once again, more desperate and wary than before.

Ethan's heart fluttered. What truer love could there have been between a man and a telepath? There could be no accusations of lies, affairs, concealed gambling debts, or covert drinking problems. There could only be invincible, absolute trust… But yet, he would have no privacy with this woman. No intimate secrets he could keep to himself and no filter with which to moderate any passionate thoughts that might hurt her. However, the creature comforts of private thought were things he was willing to sacrifice. Jill would always know to trust him and she would always be willing to forgive him if he ever hurt her in a fit of passionate thought. Surely, this was an Orwellian romance if ever there was one. He felt secure to know that Big Sister was always watching and that he loved her back for it…Perhaps, they would both get married after they escaped from the island.

"The island," Jill said, repeating Ethan's thoughts, "Right. So, Which weapons do you want to take along?"

Why not all of them? Couldn't Jill find some attache cases or duffel bags to fit them all in? If she found some blankets and posterboard to make labels with, she could surely find…

"That's a great idea!" Jill said, panting like a dog, "Don't mind if I already ran off to get one!"

Jill had apparently used her pathogenically-augmented speed to hunt down a steamer trunk with little rollers on them.

"Oh, this isn't a steamer trunk, it's an Item Box! Umbrella mastered sixth dimensional storage back in the 90's so we can put lots of stuff in here!"

The weapons had disappeared. Ethan caught a glimpse of Jill cramming a ball of cluttered metal, wood, and polymer into the item box and slamming its lid tight. Jill's limp fist was now clutching the box's handle, lugging the item box around on its rollers as one would take along their overhead storage.

"So," Jill said, "Are we ready to go?"

"Yeah," said Ethan.

"Great, let's go West," Jill pointed her finger in a seemingly random direction, "this way!"

How did she know which way West was?

"When Wesker was doing his experiments on me, he injected mercury into my brain and my X-virus infection prevents me from suffering any ill effects. In fact, the mercury pools to the north side of my skull so I always know where North is!" Jill touched her temple with her finger even though the Mercury wasn't actually pooling at that spot because that wasn't where North was at that moment.

The item box would be a bitch to bring along, though. It was quite heavy and weighed down further with an entire arsenal. It would be enough of a slog to go through a maze of winding tunnels drenched in waters of every color.

"Don't worry about the item box, Ethan. Since it has sixth dimensional storage, we can just find another one somewhere else in the facility and grab the same weapons we put into them from those," Jill hopped to the direction of the sewers and started loping her way west with Ethan shadowing her movements with timid footsteps.

For a moment, Ethan stopped to hesitate for he was still a bit nervous about entering the sewers, in spite of the G41 he was carrying.

"You can still hold my hand if you want to." said Jill.

Ethan looked at Jill's hand, then turned his gaze up to meet Jill's, her Mona Lisa smile stretched a little bit. But what about the item box?

Ethan gave her a smile of his own and took her hand. Jill's eyes fluttered shut, her smile grew wide, and her head tilted, more like a Rottweiler puppy this time.

Jill skipped ahead into the sewers like she was following the Yellow Brick Road from Wizard of Oz, dragging behind her daisy-chained captive who felt more like they were skipping down a gray brick road to K-Mart where they were going to buy a shotgun from the sporting goods department to kill themselves with.

Nevertheless, they kept on walking and didn't look back.

Ethan kept thinking that they were lost and Jill would keep assuring him that her X-Virus infection gave her a keen sense of direction. Nevertheless, Ethan was too neurotic to keep his mind off of his feelings of being lost. He read a story on the internet long ago about a girl who got lost in an uncharted network of catacombs under some city in a former soviet puppet state after she got high during a rave that was being held in some corner of the maze and disappeared. Her body was found a few weeks after she had died of... something. Whether it was fright, thirst, starvation, or La Bruja de Monterrey: could never be known. She was too bloated and the vermin had gotten to the carrion she left behind. Ethan did not want that same fate to befall either him or, especially, the love of his life.

"Oh, Ethan, stop being such a Fidgety Florence, everything's going to be okay and my keenly-honed hearing and intuition does not detect any BOW's in this place. You're letting your imagination..."

"GET THE BETTER OF YOU?" A devilish voice with a thick Russian accent, filtered with an otherworldly electronic vocoder called from the darkness.

"STOP WHERE YOU ARE AND DON'T MOVE!" a vocoded female voice with an American accent also called. Ethan and Jill turned to see two figures in gas masks that had their laser sights set on them.

"Ethan, put your hands up and do what they say," Jill whispered with a harsh rasp in her voice.

Ethan could not believe what Jill was saying. She could have killed these spooks without batting an eye by now and, here she was, insisting on surrendering to them as if either of them needed to wait and see if they had the best of intentions or not. Just how could she let this happen? HOW?!


	11. Chapter 11

"That's right," the satanic Russian in the gas mask said, "keep your grubby American paws where I am of seeing them."

A chill blew though Ethan's chest. Two figures in gas masks with MP5's were about to double tap him and he hadn't even fulfilled his dream of winning the Mega Millions lottery yet.

"Please don't hurt us, Nikolai!" Eyeliner was streaming down Jill's face as she pleaded for the man to hold his fire.

"Chto? How do you know my name?" Nikolai's head darted around nervously, "I use Tor to browse internet and everyt'ing!"

"It's me, Jill Valentine! I recognized your idiolect! You tried to kill me with a helicopter, in Raccoon City, remember?"

"Ploshchad!" (a/n: "Ploshchad" sounds like "Bullshit." Go on Google Translate if you don't believe me) Cried Nikolai, "Jill Valentine is brunette. You are blonde! Do not fool me, Amerikanskaya!"

"But it really is me! Don't you remember that one time in '98 when you told me that you and your team were sent in to record live data from your company's virus monsters?"

"Eto tak? Then who was I be withing!"

"Cpl. Carlos Oliveira and Cpt. Mikhail Victor."

"Hmm..." Nikolai made thinking sounds, "that only means you are Umbrella body snatcher and is impersonating Jill Valenteen!"

"Why would you think that?" Ethan barged into the conversation.

"Hmmm," Nikolai made more thinking sounds, "Nu, when you put it that way: that is stupid assumption to make. Okay, I believe you! You can be easy, Gospazha Chambers."

"Chambers?" Ethan hadn't heard that name in years, "who's this 'Guspashrah Chambers'?"

"That's me!" The woman pulled off her mask. She did not look a day over 19.

"Rebecca?! You're Here?" Ethan was astonished.

Rebecca looked at Ethan with surprise. Now that she could hear him clearly without her mask damping her hearing: she could recognize his voice, "Ethan? You're here, too?"

"REBECCA! I've been paying so much attention to Nikolai that I didn't even bother to use my telepathy on you!" Jill gasped and bounded toward Rebecca, "OH MY GAWD! HOW'VE YOU BEEN, I'VE MISSED YOU SO MUCH!"

Like a dog, Jill playfully leaped at Rebecca and gave her a tender football tackle, making sure to land on her back with Rebecca in a platonically loving embrace so as not to snap her spine and break her ribs with her tremendous, rambunctious St. Bernard strength. They rolled around like 19th century Swiss lovers in a hay stack, laughing joyous exuberance.

"It's been so long, Jill! I don't even remember the last time I've seen you."

"I know!" Jill shouted, "It feels like forever!"

For Ethan, this was all too bizarre. How did Jill know this girl? "Hold on a second, you know each other?"

"Yes, We were in S.T.A.R.S. together!" Rebecca said.

Ethan could not believe it. Had she really been a police officer after he broke up with her and she transferred to another school? He could hardly even imagine that she would end up serving alongside **the** Jill Valentine before she even got famous. And what was especially astonishing is how Jill was actually overjoyed to see her. He had thought he knew Rebecca as a black hole of misery who threw horrendous temper tantrums at a moment's notice and sucked cases of wine coolers like a chupacabra sucked blood out of a goat. He still had scars, although faint and hardly noticeable, from when she scratched him and flew into an animalistic fit of swearing.

"I'm sorry to hear that, Ethan, I never knew she was like that." Jill was saddened by Ethan's thoughts.

"Oh yeah, Ethan! I haven't seen you in a long time, either." Rebecca was confused.

"Yeah, it's been a while hasn't it. So you became a S.T.A.R.S. member, huh?" Ethan said.

"For a little while, yes, it turns out that I was a prodigy in botany," Rebecca said as she disengaged from Jill's hug and rose to her feet, "and I graduated from college early but I also turned out that I was really talented at working with elite police units so I joined S.T.A.R.S. as a medic. Investigating the Arklay incident was my first real assignment in the field." Rebecca noticed that Jill was looking at her so she felt the need to explain things to her, "He was my boyfriend back in high school." Rebecca said to Jill, as she disengaged from Jill's hug and stood up.

"Actually, I already knew that. You see, Wesker kidnapped me and made me into a guinea pig for his new x-virus. I'm a telepath now."

Rebecca couldn't say anything.

"Believe me, I wish I could broadcast my thoughts so it'd be that much easier to explain. It's a very long story; even longer than the one about how my hair turned blond." Jill's eyes suddenly lit up as the torch of inspiration auspiciously ignited in her mind, "But at least I'm able to relay information faster than speech!"

Using her telepathy, a pen, and a notebook that she stored in her cleavage, Jill transcribed Rebecca's, Nikolai's, and Ethan's thoughts and recollections and also jotted down the details of her x-virus infection to get everybody up to speed. She was able to write six pages in the blink of an eye so it only took her about 50 seconds for her to write everything she needed and she also taught everyone to speed read so they were able to fully digest the information within five minutes.

With this, Ethan, learned every pertinent detail about Rebecca's and Nikolai's lives. After Rebecca's family moved to Colorado: she was hospitalized in a mental ward after a half-hearted attempt to take her own life. She was later diagnosed with Borderline and Histrionic Personality Disorders as co-morbid conditions. She found peace through Zen Buddhism and medicinal botany and she wrote her thesis on a drug of her own concoction, using herself as a test subject, that treated mood swings, sociopathic behaviors, and anxiety associated with conditions similar to hers with greater efficacy than the leading prescription drugs of the time.

After the Mansion incident and Umbrella's initial downfall, she became the CEO of her own pharmaceutical firm, RebeccaCorp, which not only cornered the market in the pharmaceutical sector but was devoted to ethical business practices and a major monetary benefactor for the BSAA. Recently, she had turned 40 but she invented pills that could reverse her aging and accelerate her metabolism so she would always be as young and spritely as she was when she was 16.

As for Nikolai, he had turned over a new leaf after some shady bio-terrorists from the Neo-Umbrella organization stiffed him on his payment for bringing in the ingredients necessary for creating the C-virus. His contributions to Counter-bio-terrorist forces proved an immense help for bringing down this nefarious organization and many others like it and he took a liking to being a good guy.

Rebecca and Nikolai came to the Isla del Muerte facility because he had a source by the codename of Monkey Wrench that told him that a man named Billy Coen was on the island and they came to rescue him. That man had helped Rebecca survive an onslaught of killer mutant leeches on a passenger train in the middle of the woods and kill an evil scientist named James Marcus on the night prior to the Mansion incident that she was still pining for, even in spite of meeting him one time last century; last millennium, even.

"Have you seen Billy, by the way?" Rebecca took a moment to look up from her transcript.

"No, I'm afraid I haven't." Jill was practicing yoga on a nearby block of concrete. She was sitting on her own head and had her knees, ankles, wrists, and elbows bent at angles impossible for normal humans to achieve, a boon bestowed upon her by her x-virus infection. She made herself compact enough to fit inside of a medicine ball. She then bounced into the air as though she was a Spalding basketball being dribbled by Charles Barkley and she instantaneously popped her limbs back into their normal configurations, did several backflips rapidly enough to levitate herself in the air, and stuck the landing, "Whew, all that yoga and writing made me thirsty. I think I'll drink some of this sewer water."

"Nyet!" Nikolai shouted, "Don't be styewpit!" he pulled out a bottle of Beefeater Vodka from his knapsack, "You will get disease! Drink this instead, comrade,! Is much cleaner!"

He threw the bottle and it hurtled through the air for Jill to have a quick internal monologue about how Nikolai was so dumb that he thought she would get a disease from drinking this stuff when her x-virus infection allowed her body to filter even the dirtiest water and eliminate most other diseases before it struck her in the face like a Bobby Brady's football knocking his stepsister, Marcia Brady, into a coma.

In spite of getting hit in the face, Jill effortlessly saved the bottle from being wasted and looked down at it. With a loud, invigorated gasp, her bemused, dull expression turned to one of elation. "OH! Ethan, look! He's such a cute baby!"

"Huh?" Ethan said as he looked at her holding the bottle.

Her eyes were sparkling, "HE HAS YOUR EYES!" she shouted excitedly as she made Ethan look at the surly-looking mascot on the label.

"Uh.." Ethan ejaculated non-sexually.

"Ohhh! Ethan, it's a miracle! We have a child of our own! Let's name him Niko! I'm gonna love him, and cook cupcakes and brownies for him, and I'll hug and kiss him every day before he goes to school!" Jill then twisted the cap off and chugged the bottle to the last drop. Jill hiccuped and looked down at the bottle in her hands. The horror of what she had just done dawned on her.

She fell to her knees and howled with overwhelming despair, "Oh, no! Niko! What have I done!" Jill sobbed uncontrollably, "I killed another baby and I didn't even get to baptize him, yet! I didn't baptize any of them! They're all going to come back and get me!" a ragged gasp escaped her breath, "I'm sorry! I don't want to go to Hell, I just want to be a MO-O-O-M!" Crying hysterically, Jill toppled over and rolled around in the filthy sewer water.

Nikolai and Rebecca looked at Jill, jaws wide open with amazement. They looked to Ethan for an answer.

"Eh, just ignore her." Ethan said, "I've seen her do this before."

For five minutes, Jill continued to blubber in a drunken stupor while rolling and flopping around like a minnow hopped up on amphetamines. Nikolai and Rebecca stared at her while nibbling on some Jack Link's Beef Jerky while Ethan contented himself by playing with the origami swan that Jill made for him.

Eventually, Jill picked herself up from the slough of liquid diarrhea and walked away to clean herself up by furiously shaking off the dirty water her clothes accumulated at supersonic vibrations. She then employed the sub-dermal glands she evolved to perspirate a new species of blood cell, unique to her own body, that scrubbed the filth off of her and she also released a perfume that, not only eliminated the stench she picked up from the cesspool, but elicited complements from Rebecca about its pleasant aroma.

"I'm sorry you had to see that, guys. I kind of developed a drinking problem while I was here."

"'Kind of,' is bit of understatement, comrade" Nikolai said gruffly.

"Here," Rebecca pulled out a couple of purple and green capsules for Jill to swallow, "this is an anti-depressant I developed, called Perxamine, it's like electro-convulsive therapy in pill form so this should immediately cure you of your alcoholism, psychosis, and depression."

"Thanks, Rebecca, you're the best." Jill said as she plucked the pills from Rebecca's hand and dry swallowed them.

Rebecca observed Jill for any reactions she would have. And, unfortunately for her, she had one.

Jill's pupils dilated and her voice quivered with untamed passion. She embraced Rebecca, wrapping one of her legs around Rebecca's waist. She kissed Rebecca, moaning, slurping at her lips and forcing her tongue past them.

Rebecca was feebly trying to push her off. Her screams for her to stop were muffled by Jill's tongue.

While Nikolai slipped his hand into his pants and started jerking himself off, Ethan stared in wonder at this scene.

Rebecca was able to get her mouth free from Jill's tongue like a Portculis able to slide away from the advances of a battering ram. She took a panicked gasp for air and shouted, "Jill, stop!"

"I'm sorry, Rebecca! You're so beautiful! BLEEEAGH!" Jill vomited on Rebecca's chest, "oopsie."

"Eew!" Rebecca cried.

"Hold on, I can clean it off. Just close your eyes."

Rebecca didn't close her eyes. She screamed when she saw Jill's freakish mutant tongue extend over a meter out of her mouth. She rapidly licked at Rebecca's chest to wipe away the mess she made on her shirt and then she spat her vomit out into a nearby pool of dirty water.

"Sorry about what just happened, sweetie," Jill said to Ethan.

"Uhh, don't worry about it." Ethan was too shocked to say anything further on the subject.

"That was grody!" Rebecca cried, "why'd you do that?"

"I'm sorry," Jill was contrite and coming close to sobbing uncontrollably, "it must have been a reaction I had to the drugs because of my x-virus infection."

"But, like, what about the tongue thing? What's that all about?"

"That's also because of my x-virus infection. I didn't even remember I could do that so I didn't write it down in your pamphlet."

"What even happened to you to make you like this?".

"It's Chris! He's become evil and he's working for Wesker."

"What!" Rebecca put her hands to her cheeks like Kevin McAllister from Home Alone doing his trademark scream.

"I'm not kidding, I wrote it down in your pamphlet," Jill was shedding sober tears.

"Oh," Rebecca said, "I must have skipped over that part when I was glancing through it."

"That's okay. But, anyway, I don't understand what made him like this, but he lured me to this island and told me he betrayed us because Wesker was offering him a boatload of cash and couldn't refuse the opportunity to turn it down."

"That's impossible!" Rebecca was squeezing her head with her hands so tightly that Ethan thought she would crush it between them, "he was a great guy! he rescued us all from the Mansion!"

"Times have changed, Rebecca. He's evil now, and we have to get off of this island before he knows we're here!"

"I'm not leaving without Billy!" shouted Rebecca.

"Okay," Jill was quick to relent to her whims, "I'll help you get him, but we got to be caref-"

"Hey, wait a minute!" Ethan whined indignantly, "I don't care about this guy, I want to get out of here! He's probably dead anyway and we'd just be wasting our time looking for him."

"Ethan!" Jill looked at Ethan with the stern consternation of a school marm, "How could you say something like that! She's my-"

Suddenly, Jill cocked her in the direction of a nearby pipe.

"What's wrong, Jill?" asked Ethan.

"...Yodas." Jill said, "RUN!"

"Wait, what's a yoda?" asked Ethan.

A symphony of primal screams and growls blasting from the pipe answered his question.

A moment later, a horde of hellish, bipedal lizard-things crawled out of the pipe and they all neatly filed themselves into a satanic wedge formation and started snapping their fingers. They slowly ambled towards the humans with intimidating choreography in a dread-inducing uptempo beat (1-2-3, 1-2-3 , 1-2-3-and-4-and-5), knees always bent with one foot stepping in front of the other, never deviating an inch from perfect alignment.

Rebecca stared wild-eyed at the diabolical creatures slowly sashaying their way towards towards their latest victims. She pointed her finger at them and drew in a deep gasp, "LOOK AT THOSE MONSTEEEEERRRRSSS!" she cried as her arms desperately twirled around like pinwheels.

"Stop freaking out, dummkopf!" said Nikolai, "Is nothing we can't handles." Nikolai pointed his FNP-9 at one of them, aiming for center mass, and squeezed the trigger.

The bullet harmlessly ricocheted off of it and each yoda, save for one of them, shook its abominable head from right to left, placed its left fist against its hip, and wagged its right finger in a steady, metronome rhythm while grinning slyly. The one exception got his choreography mixed up and corrected himself after he was smacked on the back of the head by the yoda behind him.

"These hunters are far more advanced than anything we've encountered!" shouted Jill, mustering her courage, "But I can fight them back really easily! You guys go on ahead without me while I hold them off, okay?"

"Okay, I trust you!" Ethan said cheerfully.

"TRUST ME!" Jill shouted with gleeful enthusiasm.

"Au Revoir, Gospazha Valenteen!" said Nikolai.

"Bye!" Rebecca waved back to her.

As the others ran off to look for Billy, Jill steeled herself for the onslaught.

The yodas made lewd and lascivious comments about her in their gutteral Hunter language, which Jill picked up on from having conversations with a Hunter bellhop that would deliver liquor to her, as they bumrushed her but Jill's x-virus infection allowed her to handily flip around like a cool, fictional ninja rather than a lame, historically-accurate one to take out each of them by stretching her legs out like Mr. Fantastic and kick each of them to crush their faces. More yodas crawled from the pipe but this did not deter her as she could keep crushing the opposition until they exhausted their-

A set of incisors dug into her ankle. She dropped like a stone and sunk into a pool of sewer water.

"HAHA! Wasn't expecting that, was ya, girlie!" The yoda that bit her said in its ugly language.

Jill surfaced her mouth to breath and could see that the yodas were all shoving each other to get a chance to swipe at her with their wicked, long fingernails, to tear away at chunks of her flesh with their teeth, and violate her with the exposed baculums jutting out of their uncircumsized penises.

It seemed that she wouldn't be able to overcome them as easily as she thought...

(A/N: Sorry, guys, this story's on ice. Since I wanted to work on my fan fiction for OneShot, I've put this one on indefinite hiatus since March. However, since it's Halloween, I believe I owe it to my wonderful fans to get one more chapter out until next Halloween. At this rate, I expect my Magnum Opus to be complete by 2036. And if you think that's an unreasonable amount of time to wait, you should tell that to George R. R. Martin. We should demand that we be allowed to make fan fictions of his Song of Fire and Ice series as reparation for working so slowly that the creatively and technically inept writers for the TV show adaptation had to write up their own plots when they ran out of chapters to adapt. Viva La Revolución, baby! I don't even like those books.)


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